I just finished up the first pass of the new file format. It saves and loads terrain data lightning fast, using way, waaay less files than before (0.39%, to be precise).
Chunk saving is now done with absolute file position look-ups from larger zone files that are saved uncompressed. Uncompressed both for speed, and for less cpu usage.
The downside is that files are now much larger, depending on how much you explore. A newly generated level takes up 42 MB. It compresses nicely, though, down to 1.47 MB, if you want to share your levels.
I figure this is worth it, since hard drives generally are pretty huge these days. This really is a lot more efficient, and it only uses 10 files for a new level instead of over a thousand for the previous file format.
Speaking of those, Infdev will load old levels after the update, including mobs and chest contents! Your saves are safe. It will automatically save the level as the new file format, and it won’t modify the old files in any way in case anything goes wrong.
Tomorrow, I’ll work on the second and final pass of the level format rewrite; entity saving, then it’s on to performance and stability updates for the rest of the week.
I aim to release a new infdev version on Friday. If that version works fine, I’ll replace indev with infdev and move on to working on something big.
YAY!
This is why Minecraft simply is the best game... !
It's getting nice.