Plugin writers, is this feasable?

[Grumalg]

Noteing that nwnx4 has much better performance than nwnx2 got me wondering. Is the nwnx4 useage overhead low enough now that a plugin could implement arrays with comparable or better performance than pseudoarray techniques?

Say something that stored everything in string form in C arrays with an end user api something like:

CreateArray(string name, string index_x, string index_y)
GetArrayString(string name, string index_x, string index_y)
SetArrayString(string name, string index_x, string index_y)

The 'name' part is to allow for more than one array. Of course, variable numbers of dimensions would require different params or recognizing something like a value of -1 meaning the dimension wasn't used.

If this approach can deliver good performance other possibilities come to mind. Things like interacting with a SQL plugin to populate an array from a set of rows. I suspect something like that would be very handy for random encounter or random treasure lists application.

I also note that since array storage would be outside the nwn process that there might be good use made of this to conserve memory from it's 2gb limit.
<edit added> Of course linked lists and queue's would also be nice toys

--- Grumalg ---

[Papillon]

I've done that with the HashSet plugin for NWNX2. It's a bit more than arrays, but can be used like them.

Regarding performance: With the current hooking (*), NWNX4 can call 41.500 SQLEncodes() per second on my machine (AMD 64 3200+) as a real world example.

Code like this: