create_datafile_index(3alleg4)

💖 create_datafile_index — Allegro manual, bestie edition 💖

okay so this one lives in the Allegro game programming library, and it's literally the glow-up your big datafiles have been waiting for. pull up a chair, we're indexing ✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

create_datafile_index — creates an index for a datafile. Allegro game programming library, no cap 🫶

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

#include <allegro.h>

DATAFILE_INDEX *create_datafile_index(const char *filename);

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so basically? this function creates an index for a datafile, and the whole point is to speed up loading single objects out of it. it's giving "I don't have time to load the entire universe today." this is mostly useful for big datafiles — the kind you really do not want to load as a whole, because bestie, why would you 😭

so what does the index actually do? it stores the offset of all objects inside the datafile, and then later you can load any single one of them quickly with "load_datafile_object_indexed". iconic behaviour, honestly.

and when you're done with it, use destroy_datafile_index to free the memory used by it again — we do NOT leave memory leaks lying around, that's not the vibe 💅

Note: if the datafile uses global compression, there is no performance gain from using an index, because seeking to the offset still requires you to uncompress the whole datafile up to that offset. so like… you did all that for nothing, ngl. 😭

example, because we love a demonstration:

DATAFILE_INDEX *index = create_datafile_index("huge.dat");
DATAFILE *object = load_datafile_object_indexed(index, 1234);
...
unload_datafile_object(object);
destroy_datafile_index(index);

🌈 RETURN VALUE 🌈

a pointer value which you can pass to load_datafile_object_indexed. that's it, that's the whole thing, go forth and index 🦋

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

• destroy_datafile_index(3alleg4)
• load_datafile_object_indexed(3alleg4)

and that's the tea, bestie 🍓 this was Allegro, version 4.4.3, and the page you just read was create_datafile_index(3alleg4) — stay indexed, stay slay 💖✨🎀