[Scummvm-devel] Avoiding loading of all plugins during startup

[Max Horn]

Am 23.06.2010 um 22:58 schrieb Marcus Comstedt:

> 
> Max Horn <max at quendi.de> writes:
> 
>> 1) Quick and simple refinement
>> ------------------------------
>> 
>> A very simple way to improve this situation slightly is to not load all engine plugins at once, but rather load one, ask it whether it supports the given game; if not, unload it and proceed to the next. This way only one plugin is held in memory and fragmentation should be kept to a minimum. But we still have an overhead (as in the worst case we still have to load all plugins). Might be worse investigating this as a quick temporary measure, though.
> 
> 
> This would not work so well on the Dreamcast, reason being that the
> plugins may be on a different CD than the game to be detected
> (usually, LucasArts did not ship ScummVM plugins on their game discs
> :).  So with this approach, it would be like

Excellent point! As you correctly point out later on, this "new" approach could of course easily co-exist with the old one. So we should and must make sure that this is actually the case. On desktop builds, it would also probably preferable to keep loading everything at once.

We also should make sure to document all this fine points somewhere, e.g. the Wiki... Alejandro, this is directed at you... :).

Bye,
Max