Raydium 3D Game Engine

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 Post subject: flexible downloading
PostPosted: Mon Aug 24, 2009 8:53 am 
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Joined: Thu Sep 29, 2005 2:59 pm
Posts: 828
All videogame engines supporting content dowloading are using, at least, a non-blocking download system. This is critical for MMORPG games and similar ones.
Currently raydium hangs while loading whatever...

I guess we should allow raydium to support:
    -downloads in background, the application has to continue working while loading.
    -to prevent openGL crashes, when we are loading a texture we should:
      1-mark that texture as "loading"
      2-load an internal checker texture (provided directly with raydium).
      3-put the download in queue
      4-when download completes, change the checker texture with the real one.
    -a callback system to check if a download has completed
    -more ideas?

Sadly, the current download system is PHP based and no idea about how to tweak it for getting the proposed features.


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 Post subject: Re: flexible downloading
PostPosted: Mon Aug 24, 2009 10:18 am 
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I like your idea very much in general and I'm thinking about a loading information as it is present in Mac OS X.
For example, when you install or wait for something in Mac OS X the user will see the remaining amount of items in the queue.
When this downloading feature will be implemented, we should perhaps provide a simple possibility to get the remaining items that are marked in the engine to be loaded, so developers can show them in different ways to the users.

In general I feel that some already started Raydium features have to be finished before new ones get to be initialized. I'm thinking especially about the lens flare effect system and the Cal3D support, that universal libraries are available since some time in both Raydium Apple SDKs. Please don't get me wrong, I really like to have new features in Raydium and also love this downloading one, that was also planned for Raydium World I think, but personally I want to get finished already started and probably nearly finished things, before thinking about new features.


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 Post subject: Re: flexible downloading
PostPosted: Mon Aug 24, 2009 10:35 am 
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Keeping the other task appart (lensflare, cal3d, and so.. I'll open a thread about) I like that download information feature you said.
In fact the games usually informs you about the file/size they are downloading.

....Maybe simultaneous multiple downloads also could be possible (not sure if this would be complicated).


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 Post subject: Re: flexible downloading
PostPosted: Mon Aug 24, 2009 11:52 am 
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Joined: Sun Mar 16, 2003 2:53 am
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Currently, the purpose of R3S is to ease development, tests and so on. The "final user" isn't supposed to be "exposed" to this features :) (or for very short moments for small files or because the package miss a few files, like it was the case in the ManiaDrive package for some Mandriva distribution)

The other point is that it works at filesystem level, it's not intrusive (there's no R3S related code in texture.c for instance) and, most of all, works for "everything" (textures, sounds, various conf/data files, PHP dependencies, ...)

So I don't see your idea as a tweak to R3S, but as a totally new feature. A rather interesting one, in facts. It's texture specific, probably a bit intrusive, but allows things like texture streaming (from a very low resolution to the final texture) and even better ...

But let's face it: it's probably quite tricky to write ! Forking/threading is probably needed, and the code should be bullet proof, since the engine should remains stable even when the download fails/stalls, and failure is something very common when you comes to network ! :)


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