Sure, but there's a limit to how many assets you can preload - which is where the move to 64bit comes in as memory is limited to under four gig. Even if you're not maxing out memory, a sudden requirement to load assets will tax the processor. Handling asynchronous preloading can be a good solution depending on the context and implementation. Sometimes there are just too many xml docs to pre-parse them all and it's impossible to predict which you will need. I suspect the current memory just isn't cutting it so they likely want to go to more memory and preload more. The improvement could be dramatic but that's based on lots of guesswork.Roguey wrote:I think thats highly doubful, as something like a 64bit .exe would take them ages at the current progress. Making XR into a 64bit app wouldnt also make the game faster; there is no reason why a 32bit app couldnt run fast.clj wrote:This would seem to suggest that the next patch may include a 64 bit .exe (which could potentially bring MAJOR performance improvements).
The problem is that .exe works on .XML files in runtime, which is a huge drain in resources (as found by people). X-Rebirth is just poorly coded. Even on my site I notice around x300 times increase in load-times when loading from cached pages, compared to building the page with XR in-game XML's game-files. If your CPU in-game is working on 1000's XML's per second, then it will be slow. XR needs to pre-load the XML, then convert them into an array. If the x300 rule works the same, then this would automatically make XR run around 300fps+. When looking at the game, I cant see why XR would actually be much stress for processor. When you look at XR, how can it use multiple cores (unlike X3AP/TC, for me 4 vs 1) but yet run 10th of the speed (and x1000 slower when SETA is at x10 in X3AP).... techially for me X3AP runs fine with 3.4Ghz worth CPU, yet XR with 13.6Ghz CPU (max) is slower. XR is wasting a lot of my CPU grunt.
Yes X3AP used XML, but only for MD, universe, scripting and a few odd things (not all the time). Nothing that demanding. The rest of it (like ships, wares, lasers, bullets etc.) were loaded in from a CSV file (/types/) which is easy to convert into a array. If this is the case, then doesnt fill me much confidence. Performance lost like this are easily to spot, and shouldnt been in release version of the game.
ps. does it really take less resources to parse csv into an array than xml?? The point might be xml tends to contain everything and the csv is divided into discrete data sets so maybe that's it.