CHAPTER 8
LOADING AND CACHING GAME DATA

by Mike McShaffry

Once you get a nice 3D model or sound, how do you actually get it into your game? Most game books present code examples where the game loads X, WAV, or MP3 files directly. This doesn’t work in real games. Real games have tens of thousands of these files and other bits of data. They might not fit into memory at the same time, either. When you see a detailed environment in Gears of War, you can bet that it fills memory nearly to the last bit, and the act of walking into another room or building needs some way of kicking out unused assets and bringing in the new, and doing it in a way that seems completely transparent to the player. So how does this really work? Take a look at Figure 8.1.