I've pretty much played every COD (COD4, MW2, MW3, BO1, BO2 and now AW) and they organize every file into their respective folder. For example, In all previous CODs, they put all *.bik in 'Videos' folder and maps and other stuff in Main/zone/English or whatever. But in Advanced Warfare, they moved everything outside and kept it unorganized. So, unlike other CODs, there is no 'Main' or 'Videos' folder. Everything is now in same folder where executable is. What is the reason behind this? For easy programming or for faster file loading? (Maybe because this game is sized 53.5 GB?)

This is Steam, do they even have an ability to control that?

Besides, why do you care? It works and that's enough.

Edit: It seems my post sounded way more rude than I intended it to.

This is Steam, do they even have an ability to control that?

Besides, why do you care? It works and that's enough.

Steam is nothing special as a developer you have the control over where files are located in your own directory structure.

It looks like COD went with an archive format for their files now which allows for better compression on the archived files. This will in turn have a faster load from the disc with perhaps a trade of in the decompression step of those files in the archive. The massive FF files seem to be the archive files. And it seems like they made a single archive per location which means you dont have to jump through the directory structure to load the files for a level. This is offcourse all speculation on my part

They had FF files before but they were in Main/English/Zone folder. Now they're all in same folder as where .exe is located. I just need to know if keeping every asset file in same folder where executable is located has any advantage or not :P

I do have an issue with directories sometimes, it's "\\" or "\" or "/" ...... agghhh

You can end up in a situation where the PC build works perfectly, but the PS4 build crashes violently simply because someone types "sound\english\audiobank.dat" instead of "sound/english/audiobank.dat"

Or a PC build crashes because they forgot to put @ in front of a path, or many other combinations of the above.

But dumping everything in a single directory to get rid of this issue seems a bit like using a 13 pound sledgehammer to crack a nut.

It's probably in no way shape or form an advantage. Unless they were trying to avoid writing relative paths. I'm surprised that they published the game like that. But... if it doesn't do havock with the game's loading time... It probably don't matter.

In my imagination... in the development process, the programs were confusing \ and /. And years of doing that, and causing builds to fail just eventually pissed off the heads. So the heads were like...

"YOU KNOW WHAT!? F*** IT! WHY NOT JUST THROW ALL THESE FREAKIN FILES INTO THE SAME GOD DANG FOLDER!"

Though... it was probably spoken of in sarcasm. Given CoDs direction... they probably don't understand sarcasm anymore, and took it as an actual design recommendation.

I do have an issue with directories sometimes, it's "\\" or "\" or "/" ...... agghhh

Just FYI, Windows has allowed forward slashes "/" as directory delimiters for a long time.