Game Development Community

Dynamically creating materials creates thousands of files

by Dave Calabrese · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 10/03/2008 (3:31 pm) · 1 replies

As my other posts have probably let on, I'm working on a game where there is some dynamic material changes happening. I've realized that whenever a change is made - the game creates a new set of .HLSL files. When my game is making a lot of dynamic changes, I'm getting over 2000 files in the procedural shaders directory! I did some hunting around in the engine code, and it looks like it is keeping a count of the materials generated, but it never clears this count. It LOOKS like, if this value is reset to 0 every time 'reinitMaterials();' is run, then it should start overwriting existing .HLSL files rather than always creating new ones. Can anyone think of a reason why this is a bad idea, or maybe have a better solution to this problem?

Thanks!

-Dave Calabrese
Gaslight Studios
NextNext Thread
PrevPrevious Thread
More from Torque Game Engine Advanced


Torque Owner Brian Richardson
#1
10/03/2008 (4:21 pm)
I don't think you'll run into any problems resetting it. In 1.8, we generate the filename based on the features of the material, so reInitMatinstance will regenerate the same filename everytime.

You could also find ShaderGenManager::openNewShaderStream, force shaderInMemory to true by removing the #ifdef. You'll have to add some sort of flush here on reInitMatinstance as well, or this will grow without bounds. The advantage here is that the shader never hits the disk.