The UDMF format is made of text. Surely that is inefficient?

[wolfboyft]

Forgive my newness-induced need to even ask such a question, but I'm making my very first WAD with little to no experience of actual editing (but I'm getting there.)

So, I wanted to make a mirror at some point to test some stuff, and I realised I needed the UDMF format to make it. I used it, made the mirror and looked in the UDMF Map Data lump in the WAD out of interest. It's literally text. Is this not inefficient? If it is, why is it used as much as it is (a lot, from what I gather?)

[Gez]

Efficiency is not as important as extensibility, and the format was created for maximum extensibility. Text compresses well, and ZDoom can load compressed WADs without problems. Even better, the PK3 archive format is compressed by default (since it's just a zip file).

You may have noticed if you pay attention to the wider world of IT that formats such as XML and JSON are very popular, and shock horror, they are text too. In our era of broadband Internet and terabyte harddrives, the advantages of a text format outweighs its drawbacks.

[wolfboyft]

Of course. Compression. Thanks for reminding me of that

[Nash]

A 50 MB UDMF .wad map compresses into like 10 KB when zipped. How's THAT for compression!

[Ixnatifual]

It's pretty good.

[wolfboyft]

The more I know.

BTW, are WADs compressed by default? I'm using SLADE 3.

[Gez]

WADs aren't compressed. You can zip them though, and then load the zip with the wad inside.

[Graf Zahl]

... which wastes a lot of RAM because it needs to keep the uncompressed WAD in memory in order to use it. Especially for UDMF this is definitely not recommended.

[NeuralStunner]

Since that's the only way to put maps in a PK3, there's not really any other option. (Unless you like dealing with cross-dependent files.)

[InsanityBringer]

Probably not too much of a problem as long as the map wads in the PK3 only contain maps

[Graf Zahl]

Maps in the Maps/ directory are handled differently.
Only WADs in the root have to be loaded into memory.

[NeuralStunner]

Okay, that makes more sense.