Best Way to Load 10^8 int Array in Unity/C#?

Questions & Answers
1

Hello,

I am building an AI to play Tetris and have compiled a large heuristic function in C#. Right now, the function is saved as a text file that I load into an array when I want to manipulate it. This 10^8 int array maps a state number to a heuristic value in this way:

array[state] = heuristic

I also have a Tetris platform built in C#/Unity. I would like to be able to access my heuristic information within this platform. However, Unity takes a very long time to read the file into memory.

I have looked into using a local database to read the information, but cannot find an easy one to set up with C# (most information I have found has to do with setting up DBs for MMO characters, which is a different problem).

I need a way to quickly load the entire heuristic into memory and perform lookups while the algorithm runs. Do you have any ideas or similar experience that could help me out?

Thanks!

2

I would pre-process that text file into a binary file with that data. 16 or 32bit ints? Either way, it’s a big file. You could use the standard Stream-related API, but I’d put it in another thread for sure. And really I would look into making probably a separate (set of) file(s) which index into that large file, then only read the parts needed at any given time. I hope you don’t want this on mobile like that. For mobile, I’d access it on a server via WWW and scripts on the server.