Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: sosman@terratron.com (Steven Osman) Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english Subject: Re: Where do we go from here? Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 13:49:09 GMT Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE) Lines: 99 Message-ID: <38b3e1be.688155885@news.playstation.co.uk> References: <38ab5135.126831333@news.playstation.co.uk> <88ti5g$ad3@chuka.playstation.co.uk> <$N4puDAb1os4Eweh@trsoft.demon.co.uk> <88ugjf$3942@chuka.playstation.co.uk> <38b54835.648851278@news.playstation.co.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: 209.27.57.69 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 1.5/32.452 On Wed, 23 Feb 2000 13:01:19 +0000, Tony Ross wrote: >In article <38b54835.648851278@news.playstation.co.uk>, Steven Osman > writes >>Hi Tony, >> >>I had discussed this issue with some SCEA members on the Tuesday night >>chat. >> >>I was suggesting to them that we should collectively put together a >>large collection of sounds, textures, etc. and create CDRs out of >>them. >> >>This way, many games can access the CD directly (you'll just have to >>get a copy of the CDR - by burning it yourself or having someone do it >>for you), and not only will it provide a nice library of items to use, >>it will make game load time much faster. (reading off the CD is much >>faster). >This may be an ideal opportunity to contribute to a new boot CD >containing everything we need. Not a boot CD! The boot CD will have to remain unchanged, you'd pop this disc in after the boot disc. >Can we use a CDR once the Yaroze has booted? My guess is yes. If I'm not mistaken, the PSX copy protection scheme involves checking the disc at bootup time. Once booted, the system should be willing to accept CDRs. Perhaps we should test it out before getting too excited. >>Since you seem pretty anxious on this point, why don't you try to >>organize it? >I would be happy to take the contributions and compile them into a disk. Good! >>I'm sure if we all contribute a little, we can have a nice collection. >>We just need to make it a "standard library", so everyone just needs >>one disc, and all the files are in the same place for everyone. >Agreed! >>A good place to start? Well, there are tonnes of free textures >>packaged with software, and available on the Internet. >Send them to me (or give me the URL) I'll look for some, but others need to help. >I can eventually burn a CDR for each interested member. Well, I think the plan will be to help out people who can't burn on their own. Personally, I can download a disc image and burn it. We can either create a .zip file with the entire directory tree, OR (probably better) an ISO image so everyone has identical discs. >Make sure that they are free of copyright problems! Yes! Very important point! >Thanks Steven for the input. > >Lets get going then. I much prefer you with this attitude than with the other you were showing earlier! We need a good sound library in there too... See if you can find people to contribute some. This definately must be a group effort. Ideally, this will be a large enough collection to keep all of the members happy for a while, so we won't have to upload many of our own graphics by hand. If the collection is not a decent one, we'll find that we just volunteered ourselves into the CDR-of-the-week club, with new versions coming constantly. An important feature that we MUST put is a text file, perhaps in the root directory, containing a name of the compilation and a version number. This way, code will be able to automatically check and see if the right disc is loaded (i.e. right volume name, and version >= desired version) Also, there was a feature I was working on in my NY toolkit that you may find interesting conceptually. Basically, in the code, wherever I need an image, I pass in both the memory pointer where the image should exist, AND a filename. The library I wrote searches FIRST for the file, and if it does not search for the file, checks the memory address for it. This way, if a CD is in that contains the right files, all loading will happen off disc, and you only need to upload the executable. On the other hand, if the CD is not there, you'll need to upload everything. Steven