Automatic archiving is annoying

[Philip Taylor]

The automatic archiver runs pretty much every time I start the game (probably because I don't start the game very often and so several data files change in the meantime). It takes ages, and tends to leave multiple giant zip files hanging around, and wastes much more time than simply loading slower unarchived files, and it leaves the game window (and sometimes the whole computer) unresponsive while it's working.

I'd be much happier if it was manually activated instead - people could run it once if they care about the loading speed, and the time lost to loading loose files after the archive becomes out of date would be more than made up for by the time gained by never automatically rebuilding the archive. We can run the archiver once manually when distributing the game, and no normal user (including modders) will change enough files for it to ever be worth automatically rebuilding the archive, particularly since it happens precisely when they're trying to play the game and it stops them from doing so. (It wouldn't be so bad if it happened at installation-time for large patches.)

(Or maybe I'm misinterpreting the problem and it's just not using the mini archives like it should do (since they never look mini - they're always about 60MB), or something.)

...

Oh, it's finished rebuilding now, I'll get back to work ;-)

[philip]

(In [5162]) Fixed #186 (problems with entity deletion in Atlas). Maybe fixed errors from rare Atlas double-shutdown, but I don't know how to reproduce the condition.

[Philip Taylor]

Oops, that previous comment should have said #189.

[Jan Wassenberg]

The automatic archiver currently/semi-permanently being disabled, I think we can close this one :)