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Zen and the art of accurate Progress Indicators...

gimp · 2003-05-07T13:47:43

I currently have a well formed engine. My levels load from XML files. Typical entities loaded from the level file would be like Terrain, Models, Sky. Each entity could of course load in more files, like a model may load surface definition files which may in turn load textures. This is all handled inline, as in If I load the model, it''ll look after loading the surfaces files and in turn the textures those surfaces need. All of this works nicely. Now, my levels load times are increasing with the more entities I add. I thought about adding a progress bar. Some thoughts that came to mind: -Use the XML parsers byte index file as a kind of progress bar. Use the current byte index to indicate how far though the file I am. This idea bites as it doesn''t reflect the actual texture\ model\terrains etc -Time the loading of terrains and replay the loading times. This bites because it won''t be reliable between machines, even on the same machine. -Load all files at the same time, XML loader just marks actual external files for later loading. I previously discounted this idea as it would complicate the engine but it''s the only thing left that''s viable. if I loaded 200 files for a level it would be ~reasonably~ accurate even though the files are different sizes. (NOTE : I guess I could query the files size and scale it''s weight against the progress bar) Any other idea''s? Many thanks, Chris Brodie http:\\fourth.flipcode.com