[gameprogrammer] Re: Embedded file monitoring system?

Oh nice that you find it in Boost. I completely forgot about boost::filesystem.

When I was reading the Halo 2 engine article I also reacted to the on-the-fly 
loading, as well on the tag system. Tag seems nice for big projects, but 
probably not for my little things. But the on-the-fly system looks pretty nice.

I'm kinda curious on how one would set up a event system like this. My guess is 
that Bungie, since Halo only exists for PC (Windows) and XBox, make use of 
windows messages or the like. Some kind of shell extension that notifies the 
engine about modifications to files in a certain folder, this maybe even runs 
as a service. Can't think of another way to get notified except for having a 
internal thread that polls files and throws internal events.

In the article Butch talked about how the on-the-fly system required that they 
never used pointers for animations, music, textures, etc. They always used an 
ID. That ID would be passed to the appropriate handler and that in turn would 
reload the texture if necessary otherwise it would do whatever it was supposed 
to (load texture into memory, etc.). Did I understand this correct? But isn't 
polling the last-modified stamp on _everything_ that's going to be used in each 
fram kinda slow?

Since I'm a C++ programmer myself, I'm kinda curious on how you're thinking of 
doing this and I'll be glad to help out in any way possible. Unit tests, 
documentation, debugging, coding, design, whatever =P Just let me know.

I think this would be an awesome lib to give to the game programming community!

Cheers
/JP



Swalrus wrote:

>On Thu, 2005-04-28 at 10:45 +0100, Trollfiddler wrote:
>
>>Unless you use java. Cross platform IO works fine on various versions of 
>>Windows and Unix. Probably no use to you at this stage, but if it really HAS 
>>to be cross platform then it's worth mentioning in case you hit a dead end.
>
>
>Unfortunately I'm coding it using C++, so Java's I/O capabilities won't be of 
>much help this time :(
>
>Anyway, I've just found a C++ library that seems portable enough (works
>on all POSIX compliant platforms and Windows), and that lets you check
>files' last modification time as I needed. It's one of the Boost.org set
>of libraries, called Boost Filesystem Library.
>
>Has anybody here used it before?
>
>And, answering Scott here, when I've coded this monitoring system I will
>release under the LGPL, so anybody can use it :) And as you suggested,
>if I manage to code that on-the-fly-assets-reloading system, I will
>upload a tutorial to the wiki :)
>
>Bye
>
>>----- Original Message ----- 
>>From: "Scott Harper" <lareon@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>>To: <gameprogrammer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>>Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2005 3:43 AM
>>Subject: [gameprogrammer] Re: Embedded file monitoring system?
>>
>>
>>>Good luck on the cross-platform-ness in this regard.  I don't know TOO
>>>much about programming on a per-system level, but from what I've
>>>learned, dealing with the filesystems is almost COMPLETELY different
>>>from platform to platform.  You would literally have to write calls
>>>using completely different code on each platform to do the different
>>>things.
>>>
>>>Although, now that I think of it, I suppose it wouldn't be unreasonable
>>>to implement this way, just a whole bunch of #ifdef's in your code, I
>>>imagine.  Careful coding would be requisite in this case, though, to
>>>ensure that each platform's code was isolated appropriately.
>>>
>>>If you do it that way, you should go to the wiki and upload a tutorial!
>>>
>>>--Scott
>>>
>>>On 27 Apr, 2005, at 7:37 PM, Swalrus wrote:
>>>
>>>>On Wed, 2005-04-27 at 13:03 +0000, John-Philip Johansson wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>While I was reading "The Guerrilla Guide to Game Code"
>>>>>(http://www.gamasu=
>>>>
>>>>tra.com/features/20050414/rouwe_01.shtml), which is a great article
>>>>btw, I =
>>>>came across this at the end; under References:
>>>>
>>>>>[Butcher]: Halo 2 =96 Chris Butcher =96 Speech at game|tech 2004
>>>>>( http://www.game-tech.com/Talks/Butcher.doc )
>>>>
>>>>Reading that document (a great reading, BTW), a Halo2 feature Butcher
>>>>talks about just caught my attention. He talks of an embedded file
>>>>monitoring system that reloads game assets when the related files are
>>>>modified on the HD. For example, if a texture image is modified, it's
>>>>automatically reloaded in the game, immediately showing 3D models with
>>>>the new texture. And the same goes for all kinds of objects (geometry,
>>>>collisions data, sounds, etc)
>>>>
>>>>This kind of thing would be REALLY helpful in a small game I'm
>>>>developing, and so I wonder how could I implement this feature.=20
>>>>
>>>>I suppose I would have to manually poll each and every file I want to
>>>>monitor every few seconds, to see if they've been modified, but... do
>>>>you know if there's a better way to do it?
>>>>
>>>>I've been googling for a library I could use to do this kind of stuff,
>>>>but the only ones I've found where non-portable (I need it to be
>>>>cross-platform), and relied on a client-server architecture (see SGI's
>>>>FAM for example).
>>>>
>>>>Do you know of any library that could be used for this? Or will I have
>>>>to code this feature from scratch?
>>>>
>>>>Thank you!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>
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