compression files?

[Gabbe]

How do i make it so that glest.exe can open compressed files so that the loading time will shorten?

[ultifd]

Hmm...I don't think it is possible... 
But if it isn't, the loading times aren't too bad...and it is better if you have already loaded a game once...so...it's all good...for me at least...   

[Gabbe]

If we had a compression format we could make loading times shorter, or load better quality models with the same loading time as we have now.

[softcoder]

In general laoding compressed files does not speed up laoding! Compression makes it better for transferring files, but loading will actually slow down since you ultimately must decompress. The best ulternative is to use better fgile formats. In Mega-Glest we added support for png and jpeg textures so that may load faster than tga. Thats just guesswork mind you as I never tested the speed differences.

[Gabbe]

Arch told me that compressed files would load faster, originally i asked how modern warfare loads faster than glest
(modern warfare 2 on PC)

BTW, i think he ment that the models could merge into one file for easier loading?

[Yggdrasil]

In general laoding compressed files does not speed up laoding! Compression makes it better for transferring files, but loading will actually slow down since you ultimately must decompress. The best ulternative is to use better fgile formats. In Mega-Glest we added support for png and jpeg textures so that may load faster than tga. Thats just guesswork mind you as I never tested the speed differences.

I partly disagree. Modern databases use compression to lower the io operations. Decompressing is much faster than loading uncompressed data (io performance gap). This only applies if one loads much data, so not really usable for glest. Nevertheless many commercial games on windows use compressed archives for their data. Not sure if they really exploit compression or have other reasons to do so (big file better than many tiny ones).

GAE trunk can load compressed archives with techtree or tilesets but i did not see any speedups in loading though.

btw, png is also lossless like tga, just more compressed.

[Omega]

Compression will make loading times MUCH higher. If you want faster loading times, the engine needs to be changed. Personally, I'm happy with the load times, and there are many other things I'd rather see in GAE and MG than faster loads.

[softcoder]

Agreed, I think it may be fruitful to combine feature requests with a voting system so dev's can know what features the community would like to see most.