nancygold's Journal

Anons are stupid and ignorant
There are several reasons Stronghold's exe did the grab process. Major ones:
1. Using a ordinal pointers to reference file's content is much faster than using a c-string.
2. The grab process also did all necessary consistency checks, ensuring all the files are present and in correct format. I.e. artists haven't messed up anything.

Of course one can come up with something like Blizzard's MPQ to avoid filenames, but that is inferior, since hashes can collide, it doesn't allow caching (and bank switching with EMS/XMS), it involves expensive division to access a file and you need a separate set of utilities, which artists will have to use and which still have to share internal data with the main exe.

Current Mood: amused