Hello, I have a question regarding strategy for saving structs of information.
I have a UI that will display a 9 items of hundreds that all share a type, say weapons. All of the data for each item is stored in a struct. I would like to save theses structs to the disk using a USave game. The game will read these structs to populate the UI, displaying 9 of them at a time. The user will also be able to change how the items are sorted ( alphabetically, by damage, by new).
My question is does it make more sense to store many independent item structs and a array of their slot names or just one Array of item structs? How does performance differ from on calling LoadGameFromSlot on multiple save game files vs one large one?
The path I was planning on taking was to store each struct individually, but my concern is the seek time that it may take to find an read each file as opposed to reading just a single file. The advantage I saw to saving each struct individually was that I would only load in memory what was actively being displayed. Also I could create separate arrays that store the slot names sorted in different orders such that I would only have to sort the data when it is being modified as opposed to each time the user wants to change the sort order.
ie:
- BaseArray[slot1, slot2, slot3, slot4]
- AlphabeticalArray[slot3, slot1,
slot2, slot4] - HighestDamageArray[slot4, slot2,
slot1, slot3]