GML Buffer Alignment Explanation?

[DankMemes]

http://docs2.yoyogames.com/index.ht...w/3_additional_information/using_buffers.html

I didn't really get the 2 bytes and 4 bytes alignment. Why does the alignment decrease by 1 after the second data byte? The offset thing I didn't really get either.

 

[TheouAegis]

Consider a buffer 10 bytes long

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

If you write a value of $FF using 2 byte alignment, the buffer would be

$FF $00 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

If you then wrote a value of $80, it would be

$FF $00 $80 $00 4 5 6 7 8 9

So after two writes the buffer would be at byte 4, not byte 2.

 

[DankMemes]

Didn’t really get that
Where did 1 go?
Why us there an extra 0?
Why is there an extra $

Is the 00 the two bite alignment?
Maybe im not getting what alignment means?

 

[YellowAfterlife]

Essentially, positions of values in a buffer are multipliers of alignment.
So, if alignment is 2 but you wrote a 1-byte value (like buffer_u8 or buffer_bool), GM will add another empty byte so that the next one would be aligned accordingly;
Similarly, if alignment is 4 and you wrote a 1-byte value, it'd have to add 3 more bytes to align the next one.
As you might imagine, this is a fairly exotic thing to desire and is only used if you are interfacing with something that uses alignment (e.g. executable file formats commonly have file sections aligned to multipliers of 4).

 

[NightFrost]

Alignment is important because buffers have an internal pointer. That is, a buffer remembers where your position is, and every read and write advances that pointer by the set alignment. If you've for example used PHP its arrays also feature an internal pointer that advances on reads and writes. The behavior is advantageous because it lets you iterate across the data structure without having to loop with a counter. Consider PHP's foreach:

// PHP code
foreach($my_array as $value){
    echo $value;
}

This will go over every position of array my_array , get the value into value variable and display it. It works thanks to internal pointer advancing on every read the looping command performs. Sadly, in GML no other data structure features pointers besides buffers.

 

[DankMemes]

Alright the pointer thing is interesting but I still didn’t how the alignment works as talked about in this link:

http://docs2.yoyogames.com/index.ht...w/3_additional_information/using_buffers.html

Can someone explain why the distance between the data gets smaller as you move right and is data added at the beginning (left) or at the back (right)

 

[Kasra_n]

Essentially, positions of values in a buffer are multipliers of alignment.
So, if alignment is 2 but you wrote a 1-byte value (like buffer_u8 or buffer_bool), GM will add another empty byte so that the next one would be aligned accordingly;
Similarly, if alignment is 4 and you wrote a 1-byte value, it'd have to add 3 more bytes to align the next one.
As you might imagine, this is a fairly exotic thing to desire and is only used if you are interfacing with something that uses alignment (e.g. executable file formats commonly have file sections aligned to multipliers of 4).

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