Ideas that hit you hard....

E-Day went by without a hitch and I got some interesting responses for my demos, which were very interesting on their own. I had one mother come up and ask me about prosthetics because her son had one foot amputated from knee down. That was kind of surprising because I had no clue about prosthetics, but it was good that I could kind of answer her question. Then another person asked me the time line by which an actual product using my algorithm could hit the market. That was kind of surprising too and gave me some food for thought. I told him maybe 5 to 10 years. So, overall, I got some interesting results, responses and ideas. Being such that its kind of a turning point in life for me, I'm really starting to think whether I should put aside my passion for game development and move into robotics.

Then on Saturday, I was suddenly hit with an idea on how to implement a virtual file system. It was one of those problems that I'd been working on for a while, but then the solution suddenly hit me. It seems that since my application is fairly limited in the sense that I only need a virtual file system to be able to store file and be able to pull them out, the design became quite simple. It seems that I can split the FS into multiple pieces. Then each piece contains fixed sized cells that end with pointers to the next piece and cell the next part of the file is. The calculated overhead for this is fairly low, even when including a header that contains information about which cells in a piece has information. The overhead is probably less than 1% the storage space if the cells are set at 1024 bytes each.

Checking for free space is a very simple task along with deleting files. The test system I'll build will probably be fairly small though. The VFS may be no more than a few MB in total size. Come to think of it, I had forgotten to implement the delete feature. I'll be using many Wind32 based I/O to speed things up, especially the use of file maps. The nice thing about file maps is that it is great when you are working on and modifying files of fixed size, which is what we are doing here. I wonder if I can later write a streaming wrapper for the VFS such that it supports the streaming of data......hmmm.......

The general coding of the test system is done, so I'll be building the wrappers tomorrow. This is going to be one of those very bad weeks though, since I have to finish the final draft of my proposal. My advisor's last revision kind of left it all in red.