You don't have to uncompress the whole thing to search for one word...  You could 
arrange it into several records that contained the compressed content - say record one 
is all a-words compressed, record two is all b-words compressed, and so on.  That way 
when you need to look up a word, you only uncompress the section you need.  Might be a 
bit slower, but you won't take up 500k....

Kevin

-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Purcell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, January 07, 2003 10:25 AM
To: Palm Developer Forum
Subject: Re: Word Lists for Games


My database contains records of compressed data.  So,
the data in the records is useless until I decompress
it.  So, I decompress the data into memory.  

When I originally started writing this game, I thought
I would simply use a database, but do you have any
idea how large a database with 40,000 records is? 
It's HUGE!!  And I really didn't want my game to be
500kb...that's a bit large for a palm game.  So, I
knew that I would have to use some sort of compression
on my word list.  After I compressed the list, the
problem was how do I store this list in my PRC.  The
code segment is limited to 64kb, so I knew that I
couldn't store my list in the PRC.  So I ended up
storing my COMPRESSED list as a resource attached to
the PRC file, then at run-time I extract the resource
as a database (containing the compressed list), and I
decompress it to memory.

Bottom-line, a database of 40,000 records is way too
LARGE for a Palm game.  And compressed data in records
is useless until it's uncompressed.

Thanks for your help!

-Robert


> My main issue is how to store and retrieve the word
> list from memory without having to create a huge
> amount of heap space to store the decompressed
> dictionary.

why do you need to store it in memory? why not just
leave the words in 
the database and do your lookups in the database
instead of in memory?

if you have everything in the database in sorted order
you should be 
able to get far more than 40,000 words.

Matt

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com

-- 
For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see 
http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/


------------------------------------------
The information in this transmittal and any attachments is privileged and confidential 
and is intended only for the recipient(s) listed above. You are hereby notified that 
any unauthorized distribution or copying of this transmittal or its attachments is 
prohibited. If you have received this transmittal in error, please notify Invivodata 
immediately at (831) 438-9550.
------------------------------------------


--
For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see 
http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/

Reply via email to