The Image Vault

The image vault is a method of storing all of your media images in a compressed form on the SD card so that they can be loaded as a single file and then expanded in memory. This speeds up loading of a more complex cluster design because the time taken to open and read many small files can be significantly longer than the time taken to open and read one large file, even though the cumulative content is the same.

Use of the image vault is optional, and likely not necessary for simple cluster designs.

While you are developing a cluster, it is probably easiest to just run without an image vault so that you don’t have to keep recreating it whenever you change something. Then once you’re finished you can create the vault just the one time. It’s OK to recereate it if you need to of course. To run without an image vault, simply delete all of the files in the \media\vault folder. This is a manual task; there is no GUI for it.

Manual generation of the image vault is no longer available, as you can generate it using the SDC tools application.

Any images configured as ‘load on demand’ will not be included in the image vault for obvious reasons

If you change the content of your xml file to add new graphical resources then these will still be loaded even if they are not in the vault. However, if you change a file that is in the vault you won’t see the changes unless you update the vault. To update it, simply re-run the vault creation function in SDC Tools.