Inside of .tar files

[JDex]

Is it possible to make an addon/plugin so that XSI can read from and write inside of .tar files (w/ no compression)? It would be really great if we could render image sequences right into a tar and access files for the FXtree right from there. It would make certain aspects of file management much more manageable.

[MDK]

That does not seem to be a too good idea to me, because tarballs don't have an extra directory like zip/rar with the file offsets for quick access..

You can add/replace stuff to a tar archive, but not randomly. That generates the hugest possible overhead when using it as a filesystem replacement (like you are suggesting).

I seriously doubt that you will win speed with this.

[JDex]

Interesting... I'll have to re-read up on this, because I've gotten a different impression from a few people (who may have been wrong) and the brief bit of reading I did made me think it was almost as fast to read/write to as a native directory.

[MDK]

I rechecked this, because my unix days ended a few centuries ago :wink: but it seems to me, that tar is still linear.

Wikipedia says: "Tar's linear roots can still be seen in its ability to work on any data stream and its slow partial extraction performance, as it has to read through the whole archive to extract only the final file."

Without random access you can't come close to what a normal filesystem does.

[JDex]

After looking into this... you are correct. Thanks for the heads up. I did do some testing... and it's really not a noticeable slowdown until you hit over ~ 4000 files in a tar (my quick tests showed about 11ms at this point... but I can see accessing parts of a texture (from a .map file) would be crazy slow.