Cyb
Posts: 2726
Registered: 07-02 |
want to clear up a couple points here. First off pk4 files are simply zip files. That said you can open them with any program that opens zip files (winzip, pkzip, power archiver and so on). Winrar is not required for this, and frankly there are better programs avaliable.
Second, the game does not load all the maps into memory, because that would require you to have a whole shitload of memory (map data is over 1gb) and it would be useless, so it only loads the map you're going to play next. It also loads all the necessary graphics and probably a bunch of models into memory.
The speed gain here is because whenever it needs to load something on the fly (often a sound) it simply can just read it directly from the hard disk which saves a nice amount of cycles. With the pk4 files it had to grab the file and decompress it, which keeps your cpu busy a bit longer (reading from disk doesn't use any cpu really).
Also loading on the fly from the pk4 is easily done, and nothing new really. It doesn't bother with the entire pk4, that would be silly, just the segement it needs. The reasons for using pk4s are to save space (/base takes up 1.44gb before you extract, 3.85gb after) and because it looks a lot neater to have four files there instead of a billion of them. Also note 3.85gb would need 6 CDs, which is a lot (though they could be stored compressed on the cds and then be decompressed during install).
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08-05-04 11:24 
