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Our single file based tag system is great for editing the game, but to run on retail Xboxes we need to optimize the resource format so that it loads quickly with a minimal amount of memory; loading from multiple single files would clearly have a lot of runtime overhead, as well as rebuilding tags from scratch every time we run a new level. Since all tags can be referenced globally by a handle, once we load a level we have all the assets we needed to load it again. And, because we have the schema for every loaded tag, we know how to serialize each tag to a fixed runtime address without having to write custom code. When we build the final resource file, which we call a cache file, we simply dump all loaded tags into a giant buffer and write that out to a single file. At runtime, we just need to read that file into a fixed address before we start the level; all other runtime systems behave the same. We do have a few custom steps for stripping out and storing demand loaded data (namely textures and sound), but the overall amount of work to implement the shipping resource files is extremely straightforward.
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