About all those zeros
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The original decoder (converting the binary ini files to text) always used six decimals for floating point numbers (the C “%f” specifier). My decoder tried to be a bit smarter about it, as can be seen in JFLP. Unfortunately, FLMM v1 matches text, so in order for mods to work, the extra zeros need to be present; v2 is more lenient, attempting to match as numbers.
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If you’re that worried about decoding performance (a few miliseconds of a difference at worst) and file size (a few kilobytes), you can always re-encode your files as BINI.
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I think Adoxa is right about this as his patch tried to make the numbers smaller.Those milliseconds add up to large bit of lag. On a server level, this ca be catostrophic. I have already been deleting extra decimal places by meticulously going line-by-line as to not delete the wrong zeros. And yes, I may recompress the files.
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It’s cleaner to remove the excess zeros, but it’s not “a large bit of lag”, nor is it “catastrophic” to leave them in. The game reads the files during load, so it won’t affect performance beyond loading times (both server and client side). Please don’t put ideas in people’s heads.
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Anytime I use FLE to edit a system those numbers get reconverted to the 6-place decimal number as well.
It’s a pain.
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Heh. I knew exactly what this topic was going to be about before I even opened it.
In my experience (and contrary to adoxa’s statement), the trailing zeroes are 100% meaningless, and I’ve stripped them from most of my files with no ill effect except to decrease the files size. All told, I’ve probably shaved a megabyte of data from that alone.
Pascal, deleting the zeroes line by line is the long, tedious, and time-wasting way to do it. Just compress your files using adoxa’s BINI program and uncompress it with his TINI program. Takes two seconds and you’re done.
As for Freelancer Explorer, I have a second copy of my mod under a different name in the mods folder, and I only work with FLE on that copy. When I’m done, I just copy and paste the things that I want to the main mod folder and edit it accordingly.
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mknote is probably the best responce I’ve seen. Those “few milliseconds” add up if on a server and you get a fair amount of people playing on the server. That becomes catastrophic. I have already been stripping those zeros and as the saying goes, “There’s never enough time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it over”.
Thanks everyone!
Pascal -
Ah, right. I thought you wanted to actually learn something instead of just confirming your preconceived notions.
Well hey, whatever floats your boat.
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Well if reasoned explanation fails, sometimes a bit more… bite helps. I just find it wasteful that people are taking time to “optimize” something that’s going to shave off, oh, maybe a second during load? That time could be much better invested working out actual bugs or adding new features.
I don’t want people to have the false impression that extra zeros are going to be “catastrophic” for server performance.
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As mentioned before, storing it again as BINI will gain much more performance. It makes removing the zeros look quite senseless actually.
