When I was brainstorming how I would implement my new plugin, I found there was one component I couldn't think of how to approach. I want to store data for each chunk in a way similar to a 2 dimensional array. I would access the data with the x and y coordinates of the chunk. However, since I have no way of knowing the size of the map, I can't instantiate a basic array without risking making it too small. I could create to use the maximum size a map can be (3.75 million x 3.75 million chunks) but that would be a lot of data to work with. Even if each item in the array was only 1 bit, that would still be 1.6 terabytes. Does anyone know a way I can do this? Some ideas I've considered are ArrayList or HashMap. Note that I plan to wrap this data in a class that implements java.io.Serializable. Thanks. Is this possible? EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.
Without knowing what exactly you want to save, this question is kind of hard to answer. One approach would be a "2 dimensional" ArrayList. But depending on the Size of the map, access times could become a big problem. An Alternative would be a HashMap, with a wrapper class for the chunk coordinates (just 2 ints) as Key, and your data as value. If you choose this method, make sure to implement a propper getHashCode(), eaquals(Object) etc. If none of those approaches fits your needs, you could seach for third party libraries aswell, maybe something simular already exists. regards, minoneer
I think I have an idea. The data type I intend to store is boolean. Perhaps I can use a Set. Since the default is false, the Set starts empty. I add chunks when I set their data to true, and remove them when I set their data to false. That way, I can just use contains(Object) to get the data I want. Would this be a good idea? What implementation of Set should I use if I want it synchronized? Update: I did it by extending ArrayList
