Packing resources into larger files

Summary

Preparing resources is one of the heaviest operations for any rendering engine, RAMSES is no exception. Typically most of the resources (textures, shaders, vertex geometry) are immutable and known in advance and can be preprocessed and stored in files.

When deciding how to partition the resources into files, consider keeping resources in the same file which are mostly used together or loaded together. This can increase loading times because RAMSES will read several of the resources from the file at once.

For convenience, RAMSES provides a tool to pack multiple resource files together.

Usage

The resource packer tool accepts a list of resource files as input, and a filename where to write the resulting combined resource file.

With full named arguments:

ramses-resource-packer --in-resource-files-config <filename> --out-resource-file <filename>

With short named arguments:

ramses-resource-packer -ir <filename> -or <filename>

Parameter description:

–in-resource-files-config/-ir: input, the config file constaining the list of all input resource files.
–out-resource-file/-or: ouptut, the file where the combined resources will be stored.

Resource files config description:

The ramses-resource-packer expects a config file which holds all input resource files as a list of filenames separated by new lines. A valid resource files config file looks like this:

res/effect-resource-1.res
res/effect-resource-2.res
res/texture-1.res
res/texture-2.res
res/texture-3.res