ABOUT OUR WORLD
Where Did My Hard Disk Space Go?
June 22, 1996
I remember in one early beta there was a bug in the caching algorithm for AlphaWorld where the cache would grow very rapidly...when Da5id (Dave Gobel of Worlds) mentioned sluggish response, I told him to check his cache size. I still remember his response: "Isn't that special! It's over a gigabyte!"While chances are unlikely that we'll ever have that problem again, it is possible for AlphaWorld to take more and more of your hard disk. In the future, steps will be taken to minimize this, but there are some things you can now to keep hard disk usage down. First, let's look at how the local caching works.
There are two basic kinds of local cache. One is a database really...it's a smaller version of the database kept on the AlphaWorld server, which records object types and locations, with actions and descriptions, citizen ID of the builder and so forth. Of course, the files on your hard disk (CELL and SECTOR) only contain data about the areas you have visited, and each area's information is only updated when you re-enter that area. These files are relatively small, although they do grow as you travel.
The second type of local cache is the artwork from various servers, mostly the AlphaWorld server but increasing as other servers such as Colony Alphy and Cyborg Nation add art. As you see each model and the bitmap textures that are mapped to it, they are downloaded to your hard drive, where they stay. Only one copy of each file is kept, then the information stored in the CELL and SECTOR files tells the client software where the objects are located and how they are rotated, etc..
These files themselves are usually quite small. However, most hard drives these days have a relatively large cluster size. The cluster size on a DOS (or Windows) hard drive is the smallest amount of hard drive space that can be allocated. On most systems these days the cluster size is at least 32K. This means that a file that only really needs 1 byte will always take up over 32000 bytes!
Let's do a little simple math here...with 700+ models in AlphaWorld, one trip to LittleBull's construction yard to view all of them will cost you at least (700 * 32k) = about 22 megabytes! The textures are another thing, although there aren't nearly as many of them. In the future this situation will be alleviated by storing the models in a database, instead of in separate .RWX files as they are now. But right now if your hard disk space is at a premium, this situation can be problematic.
Now, you may have noticed that considerably more than 22 megabytes has disappeared from your hard drive due to AlphaWorld. The reason is this: under each MODELS directory is a directory called FLAT. In that directory the client software stores a copy of each model, without the bitmap textures. This means another 22 megabytes. The "flat" models are used when you choose not to view bitmaps (under the Options/Performance menu choice) or if you don't have enough memory to render with bitmaps (less than 15 megabytes probably), or when you haven't yet received the bitmap textures from the AlphaWorld web site.
Chances are you already have autodownloaded the textures, and you have enough memory to render bitmap textures (that's the "normal" AlphaWorld mode, in "flat" mode you just see shaded polygons.) If this is the case, you can delete the contents of the directory \AWORLD\FILES1\MODELS\FLAT and possibly regain a lot of real estate on your hard disk. This assumes that the first world you visited was AlphaWorld, which is almost always the case. If you have visited other worlds as well, you will see similar directories: \AWORLD\FILES2\MODELS\FLAT, etc.. You can delete all these files as well.
If you're running DRIVESPACE to compress a hard disk, and assuming you have a fast processor, you might want to think about using the compressed drive for AlphaWorld if you need to save extra space. Since compressed drives are actually only one physical file, the space taken for all the models in AlphaWorld will shrink to about 1 megabyte before compression!
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