MapThis! Ideas on best way to get maps onto the psp needed

**vibez** · August 22nd, 2006, 21:51

I just made a massive x64 map.

I tried two ways of getting this onto the PSP.

My 1st way was to zip the file and transfered it to the psp by my usb cable. Transferring was very quick, but I never got it loaded in the map viewer because even after an hour, mapthis still han't managed to open the file and the red memorystick light on the psp was still blinking so I had to abort it

My 2nd way was to transfer the files unzipped to the psp. Transferring took about 2hrs but to my surprise, mapthis opened the map instantaneously

Is there a better way to load large maps? Would a memory card reader speed up transferring files compared to the usb cable?

Would it be quicker transferring the zip then using some tool to unzip directly from the psp?

Any ideas guys?

**deniska** · August 22nd, 2006, 22:06

The problem is that your PSP must create a directory entry for each file and this process is very slow...
Once all those entires are there, accessing the files works very fast...

Deleting is pretty slow too, so you may want to consider moving "other stuff" out and formatting the card...

The zip files, of course, transfer very fast, but overhead of looking for files within the zip becomes notisable with map sizes over 16-32x...

I may need to look in to creating a proprietary storage format, to overcome these problems in the future...

**vibez** · August 23rd, 2006, 12:52

I agree a proprietary format might be best. I wonder if any other devs have created a format we can borrow for such a large number of files. Such as the ISO format

**fokia** · August 23rd, 2006, 13:56

Originally Posted by vibez

I agree a proprietary format might be best. I wonder if any other devs have created a format we can borrow for such a large number of files. Such as the ISO format

ISO or CSO seems a good Idea... The thing is that handling such amount of files takes to much time... even for USB2.0...

**Blac OrKhiD** · August 25th, 2006, 15:16

i was able to put 87,135 map files on my ms.
it took only 525mb............but it took over 9 hours!

**fokia** · August 25th, 2006, 15:41

Originally Posted by Blac OrKhiD

i was able to put 87,135 map files on my ms.
it took only 525mb............but it took over 9 hours!

@
Deniska

Can't you port DAX or CSO from DAX loader or even DevHook (or anyother)

I think the major problem is handling all those files one by one...

**vibez** · August 28th, 2006, 13:21

CSO and DAX are compression formats. From what I remember, they tend to slow gameplay down in some cases and I would expect we would have a similar issue like we do with reading from zip files. Has anyone tried creating a zip without any compression, maybe that will speed it up?

**deniska** · August 28th, 2006, 14:37

it's not the compression but rather the time it takes to look up file in the zip, since they all seem to be lined up linearly...

**kochiro** · August 28th, 2006, 14:53

What about something where there is a reference file for the map files? Something like a simple text file that has the files listed in the correct order.

That way you would not have to parse a directory and would just read through a text file that contains the filenames instead. Then once you have the filename just go grab it from the directory.

There might be other ways to make it faster using this type of method but since I haven't read through the source I'm not sure what they might be yet.

I'm thinking that you might be able to read the text file and then store the filenames in an array in memory for faster reference.

Or is the issue that you have to "walk" over the first 20 files to get to the 21st and can't just jump to number 21?

Jay