PROGRAM EFFICIENCY

While there are a number of advantages to distributing software over the Internet there are two disadvantages which are currently preventing many programs from using the method.

The first is simply that many people are still unhappy with using their credit cards online. If a program is to meet its sales potential then it must still be available offline - for that reason there is a cdrom version of SaaP available offline from agents in the USA, the UK and Australasia in addition to online ordering.

The second reason comes from the mismatch of Windows file size and access bandwidth for most Internet users - files are too big and download speed too slow! Windows files are often referred to as "bloatware", indicating that the file size is considerably greater than is strictly necessary. This is a lot worse than most users realise.

Load up the text editor from DOS, put "Hello World" in the body of the text and save the file. Do the same using Word for Windows. The file created from the DOS edit program is 48 bytes. The file from Word for Windows is over 90,000 bytes.

Let me repeat that. The first is 48 bytes the second over 90,000 bytes - nearly 2,000 times as large as it needs to be.

Files in Windows just do not have to be that big. Why does it occur? Because it makes for cheaper software development to let the development software do all the hard work and the programmer do as little as possible. The software is cheap compared with the programmer's time. The unfortunate thing is that the development software is hopelessly inefficient - bloatware itself making bloatware on bloatware - and Windows itself is hopelessly inefficient. But, of course, it didn't matter - computer memory and cdroms are cheap.

However, it matters enormously when distributing software over the Internet! 100 Mbyte files are not easily passed across the Internet.

SaaP has been developed using a far more efficient development system. For the same functionality it produces files that are less than one tenth the size of those from development systems currently in vogue. This allows the file size to brought down to manageable proportions and for these to be directly downloaded by users or even supplied attached to email.

Not only are these files far easier to distribute over the Internet but they load and run more than twenty times faster. In SaaP a one Mbyte bitmap file is loaded in and scaled from 640 x 480 pixels to whatever the screen resolution the gamer has on his PC in a fraction of a second on any Pentium PC - the user sees the briefest flash. Microsoft's own Image Composer takes over 10 seconds to do the same. More sophisticated image programs can take even longer.

The result is that SaaP can be easily be delivered over the Internet and will run adequately on PCs which have less in the way of processing power and memory capacity. Zipped up the minimum file size is only 1.4 Mbytes (with limited graphics) and will run with some options disabled on a Windows 3.1 PC with only 4 Mbytes of memory. The full game (zipped to 5 Mbytes and using 30 Mbytes hard disk unzipped) we fully test, graphics and all, on a 100 Mhz Pentium with 16 Mbytes of memory. The only delay that occurs over one second is the savegame process - it takes about 10 seconds.