admin.cpp, void FileAccess(char mode) - What does it do? about raceintospace

[willglynn]

It's my understanding that ENDTURN.TMP is a savegame file, which is a little header followed by a dump of struct Players all fed through RLE compression. It's not at all graphics-related and has no business using graphics buffers, other than memory pressure in the DOS version meant that unnecessary graphics buffers were primo for scratch space.

[kiyote]

Okay, I'm going to replace it with another buffer and see what happens.

[mkmccarty]

The use of the graphics buffers is a holdover from the DOS days where we were using memory wherever it was available. The file is used to create save games. The ENDTURN.TMP is created and whenever the player wants to save the game this file is used to create the save game file so the restored game begins at the beginning of the turn and not at some midpoint after R&D or other turn activities.

[willglynn]

Could we hold this data in RAM instead of writing it to ENDTURN.TMP? What is the lifecycle of the temporary file?

[mkmccarty]

This was written to disk originally because of the limited RAM space. There's no reason could simply be held in RAM and used when necessary.

[kiyote]

Quick unrelated question. BUT files are just straight-up byte-for-byte copies of the image data, yes? Erm, with palette info, as well, I mean. No compression or anything?

[willglynn]

The game uses several different ad-hoc image formats. The best key is the but2png source.

[kiyote]

Thanks.