Single Files vs Versioned Files

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‌Single Files vs Versioned Files

The Scene and Mesh Area modes can be used whether a mesh was imported or created within SynthEyes. Meshes are de-duplicated, or not, based on the size of the mesh. Since there is no original imported mesh, the mesh is entirely contained in the SBM file; if the SBM file is deleted, lost, or missing, the mesh is gone—the SBM file is not a "cache".

The Scene modes store SBM files in the folder with the SNI scene. The Mesh Area modes store them in the Mesh Area folder described earlier.

The Scene and Mesh Area modes come in both Versioned and Single variants.

Here's the problem that is being solved:

Suppose you have a SNI file with a large mesh that you edit from time to time, and you are keeping different versions of the file, possibly using an auto-incrementing auto-save. You have v05 of the file, and just wrote v08. Now you want to go back to v05—but the mesh was different at that time.

Unless the mesh de-duplication has kept separate versions of the SBM file,

going back to v05 accurately will be impossible. The Versioned modes do keep multiple versions, producing a new SBM when the mesh has changed.

For example, suppose the mesh changed between v02 and v03, and v06 and v07. The de-duplication code will write new SBMs associated with v03 and v07 of the file, and none for v01, 02, 04, 05, 06, or 08. When you go back to v05, you will be using the SBM written for v03. If you re-open v08, you will be using the SBM from v07.

While SynthEyes can automatically limit the number of auto-incremented SNI files, it does not automatically cull the SBM files—that's a bit tricky! In the example above, the SBM from v03 is used for v06, so even though you may delete the v03 SNI file, you may need to keep its SBM files for quite a while. SynthEyes can't keep SBM files for each SNI—that's what we're avoiding in the first place!

So at some point you may need to clean up the SBM files manually. You can determine what SBM files a given SNI file uses by looking at the mesh file list in its File/File Info.

The Single modes avoid this complexity by not doing versioning: they keep only the single, most-recent, version of the mesh. That will cut down the number of versions of SBM files you have, and the thought process required to clean them up. But, if you go back to an earlier version of the file, you'll still get the most-recent version of the mesh. That could be a huge problem, or none at all, depending on what you're doing. So pick wisely!

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