common.lin is a separate file which I believe is supposed to contain data common to all levels _before_ the level is loaded.
There's a single exported object that all levels of the game have called `MyLevel`. The game attempts to load this and it triggers a load of the level data and all its unique dependencies. The common.lin file is a snapshot of everything read before this export. AFAIK this is deterministic so it should be the exact same across all maps but I've not tested all levels.
When loading a level, the training level for instance contains two distinct parts. Part 1 of the map loads 0_0_2_Training.lin, and the second part loads 0_0_3_Training.lin. These parts are completely independent -- loading the second part does not require loading the first. It does a complete re-launch of the game using the Xbox's XLaunchNewImage API, so all prior memory I think should be evicted but maybe there's some flag I'm unaware of. That is to say, I'm fairly confident they are mutually exclusive.
So basically the game launches, looks In the "Training" map folder for common.lin, opens a HANDLE, then looks for whichever section it's loading, grabs a HANDLE, then starts reading common.lin and <map_part>.lin.
There's multiple parts, but only one common.lin in each map folder. So no matter what it's not going to be laid out in a contiguous disc region for common.lin leading into <map_part>.lin. Part 1 may be right after common.lin, but if you're loading any other part you'll have to make a seek.
I don't know enough about optical media seek times to say if semi-near locality is noticeably better for the worst case than the files being on complete opposite sector ranges of the disc.
They were doing this kind of optical media seek times tests/optimisations for PS1 games, like Crash Bandicoot.
You certainly have more and better context than me on this console/game, I just mentioned it in case it wasn't considered.
By the way, could the nonsensical offsets be checksums instead?
IIRC the average seek time across optical media is around 120ms, so ideally you want all reads to be linear.
I remember one game I worked on, I spent months optimising loading, especially boot flow, to ensure that every file the game was going to load was the very next file on the disk, or else the next file was an optionally loaded file that could be skipped (as reading and ignoring was quicker than seeking). For the few non-deterministic cases where order couldn't be predicted (e.g. music loaded from a different thread), I preloaded a bunch of assets up front so that the rest of the assets were deterministic.
One fun thing we often did around this era is eschew filenames and instead hash the name. If we were loading a file directly from C code, we'd use the preprocessor the hash the code via some complicated macros, so the final call would be compiled like LoadAsset(0x184e49da) but still retain a run-time hasher for cases where the filename was generated dynamically. This seems like a weird optimisation, but actually avoiding the directory scan and filename comparisons can save a lot of unnecessary seeking / CPU operations, especially for multi-level directories. The "file table" then just became a list of disk offset and lengths, with a few gaps because the hash table size was a little bigger than the number of files to avoid hash conflicts. Ironically, on one title I worked on we had the same modulo for about 2 years in development, and just before launch we needed to change it twice in a week due to conflicts!
Mel's job was to re-write
the blackjack program for the RPC-4000.
(Port? What does that mean?)
The new computer had a one-plus-one
addressing scheme,
in which each machine instruction,
in addition to the operation code
and the address of the needed operand,
had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum,
the next instruction was located.
>By the way, could the nonsensical offsets be checksums instead?
If you're referring to those weird "addresses" that quickly became irrelevant, there's a CRC32 somewhere in the header immediately after them. The address value is the same across files with different contents too.
I was talking to a friend of mine about it and he suggested that maybe whatever process generated the files included the file's load address in case it could be mapped to the same address for some other optimization?
ISO9660 has support for something that resembles hard links - IE, a file can exist in multiple places in the directory structure, but always point to the same underlying data blocks on disc.
I think XISO is derived from ISO9660, so may have the same properties?
Definitely could be a factor; I know of a programmer who works at a Dutch company that mainly does ports of AAA games (he may be on here too, hello!), he once wrote a comment or forum post about how he developed an algorithm to put data on a disk in the order that it was needed to minimize disk seeks. Spinny disks benefit greatly from reading data linearly.
> with Linux Desktop marketshare still slowly, steadily rising over the last 10 months.
Where do you get these figures from? Is there a sensible % increase?
I've been using Linux desktop for a decade now and I am certain it still used by few, and nothing has changed recently. Or you're telling me 2026 is the year of the Linux desktop?
Probably not 2026, but sure, by 2030. A fair chunk of the younger generation do give a shit about privacy (see also: torrenting on the rise again), Linux is mostly unattended with respect to configuring things these days, and things like "sound" and "games" are for the most part a thing of the past outside of 4 or 5 specific games that require kernel-level anticheat.
Same principle as why many people prefer not to own shares in the company that employs them -- you're already heavily exposed to that specific risk and don't want to add more. If you live in Florida then a hurricane in Florida already might mean financial loss for you if it damages your house, so buying a CAT bond that covers a different thing is more diversified risk: you might get "house is trashed" or "bond is total loss" but at least you probably will not get both at once.
Try `10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(0)1); : GOTO 10` in yabasic or `10 PRINT CHR$(47+INT(RND(1)2)*45); : GOTO 10` in most modern BASIC dialects, which explicitly chooses between '/' (47) and '\' (92) characters.
That is a self-contradictory statement. If people were not motivated by financial gain, then bribery would not exist. You could say people might be motivated by power and influence, but even those things boil down to one singular thing, and that is accumulating wealth.
My most common issues with systemd are related to those long timeouts when something at boot/shutdown is not working as intended, and unexplained/unexplainable changes to the order of boot of some components. For the former I have given up playing whackamole with all the timeouts you need to reconfigure, for the latter I didn't even try because I know that there's something peculiar about my setup that will never work nicely with systemd, there's simply not enough systems configured like that for upstream to care.
I have accepted this new reality, but I know that before systemd I was able to fix any highly customised setup of mine, now I have to avoid that and minimise tinkering/hacking.
> now I have to avoid that and minimise tinkering/hacking.
I think this right here hits at the crux of the issue.
There are people who like systemd because it's integration-tested with itself and its own defaults, so if you never change those defaults you don't have many problems.
Then there are people who don't like systemd because if you do have to change any of its defaults, it often doesn't go well. And, of course, the latter behavior as a box users are expected to live in is poisonous, because everyone is being conditioned to be passive and uniform.
Plenty of people changes systemd configuration all the time and it just goes fine. You live in fantasy.
Even op is basically saying: “my issue with systemd is that I dislike the timeout configuration of some services but I stubbornly refuse to change these configurable timeout durations because it would show that the problem was myself and I prefer blaming systemd.”
It takes no time whatsoever to get a boot graph with each services name and starting time. That’s an actual feature documented in the manual of systemd which solves OP issue. But of course it would require actually understanding something new and everything new is bad, isn’t it?
> Plenty of people changes systemd configuration all the time and it just goes fine. You live in fantasy.
"since I have never experienced what you say, it must be fantasy"
> Even op is basically saying: “my issue with systemd is that I dislike the timeout configuration of some services but I stubbornly refuse to change these configurable timeout durations because it would show that the problem was myself and I prefer blaming systemd.”
This is a perfect example of toxicity; I have been successfully using systemd for years and I am entitled to point out what I dislike, I do not have to love everything of it, it's not a religion nor a cult. Your reply tells more about yourself than the topic of the discussion at hand.
> It takes no time whatsoever to get a boot graph with each services name and starting time. That’s an actual feature documented in the manual of systemd which solves OP issue. But of course it would require actually understanding something new and everything new is bad, isn’t it?
You're missing the point, the problem is not changing timeouts but preventing failure and achieving an overall deterministic behaviour out of your system, without ignoring failures. But I refuse further eating these baits, you seem more interested in creating some flames rather than having constructive discussions.
> I have been successfully using systemd for years
You are writing that you have been unsuccessfully using systemd for years because of the annoying timeout. I'm replying that it's entierely your fault because it takes seconds to make these timeouts disappear.
That's not toxicity. That's calling out some non sense on the internet.
> And, of course, the latter behavior as a box users are expected to live in is poisonous, because everyone is being conditioned to be passive and uniform.
No, it's not, this assumes that the other camp are all idiots.
Mainstream distros should be rock solid and boring.
Linux never got anywhere with the standard distros because they're all so different.
Tinkering is a different mindset (and has a different place) than professional engineering work.
Systemd is basically engineering, SysV & co. were basically old school tinkering/hacking.
In the same vein, don't be creative with bolt sizes. Be creative with what those bolts allow you to achieve. Be creative at a higher level. That should be the nature of humanity.
> Linux never got anywhere with the standard distros because they're all so different.
This is eliding the difference in what you want to be standardized.
Take system logging for example. You definitely want some standard interface to do it so all the different daemons and things can implement it once regardless of which system logger the distribution is using. But once it passes that data to the other program, it's under a different dominion of control which should operate as a black box with respect to the program generating the data and the rest of the system.
Because that's how you prevent ossification -- which is engineering. You want to make it so the other component can be improved or substituted. One system logger is designed to store the logs on a central server instead of the local machine, another supports modules so other people can easily write log-parsing scripts. And when you come up with a new idea for a third, you don't have to be on the systemd team to publish an independent implementation that other people can use as a drop-in replacement, instead of (not in addition to) the default one, without requiring it to be separately integrated with a dozen moving targets in the systemd repository.
What you're trying to do is to allow this:
> In the same vein, don't be creative with bolt sizes. Be creative with what those bolts allow you to achieve. Be creative at a higher level.
You want to standardize the bolt sizes, i.e. the interfaces between components. What you explicitly don't want is to replace bolts with having everything epoxied together.
But that's what happens when you e.g. integrate the logging system with the service manager, which is the sort of thing people are complaining about.
We've had Unix for what, close to 55 years now? Nobody standardized and got widespread adoption for those standards, which BTW, especially when you look at corporate interests regarding the web, are easily sabotaged.
So I'd rather have the epoxy open source standard than no standard.
There are things that systemd does better than SysV and other things it does worse and you can want it to stop doing the things that are worse while still doing the things that are better.
There, done. That's all the timeouts you'll ever need. Go and complain to your distribution they are setting the wrong defaults, even desktop environment(s) already recommend[1] setting it to a low value.
You can stop hating on systemd now, everything you needed was in `man systemd-system.conf` all along.
> There, done. That's all the timeouts you'll ever need. Go and complain to your distribution they are setting the wrong defaults, even desktop environment(s) already recommend[1] setting it to a low value.
You can stop hating on systemd now, everything you needed was in `man systemd-system.conf` all along.
Here's another example of cultism repressing any dissent.
Let me make a bullet points list for you:
* I do not hate systemd, I have never stated that, I have been using it for possibly longer time than you and love most of it
* I am entitled to write about what I don't like, you can disagree and move on, we all need to do this exercise on a daily basis
* there are cases where systemd will change the order of dependencies during boot, that's by design because systemd works in a way that tries to achieve states. It's not really enforcing a graph with order
* in a sufficiently complex system, this constitutes a source of non-determinism and it is basically undebuggable: you see the failure, learn about the corresponding configuration, change it and hope that you did the correct change (you have no way to test this until next random occurrence)
That's all, it's based on my experience; I write plenty units on a regular basis and 99% of the times everything goes very well.
> My most common issues with systemd are related to those long timeouts when something at boot/shutdown is not working as intended
That’s an issue with a daemon, not systemd. Anyone who used NFS saw that routinely on SysV init during the era when Red Hat distributions shut down networking before ensuring that the network mounts were unmounted.
I regularly see it also on a system not using NFS, and it seems related to console seats. Never went to the bottom of it because it's sporadic/non-reproducible.
Yes - my point was simply that the shut down process tells things to stop but most sysadmins have war stories about that not working well for all kinds of things.
The problem is that there isn’t a universally correct way to do this: if my web server has hung, SIGKILL is what I want to get the system back in a usable state as quickly as possible but if it’s a file system, database, etc. you have questions like losing data which aren’t trivial to answer (e.g. if it’s a transient error, waiting for it flush is good but if my storage had an irrecoverable error I might want write off that data as lost and focus on getting the service back up).
