I am developing a binary file format to store my game's assets and I am thinking about how to implement the "file table". One option to would be to create a structure for file entries like this:

    struct Entry
    {
        uint16_t nameLength; //< This basically stores the whole path e.g "dir1/file1.txt"
        char*    name;
        uint64_t dataSize;
        uint64_t dataOffset;
    };

Or i could use a method, which I think is more elegant and is based off the ISO 9660 filesystem, however I think it may have a performance impact on traversing the file tree.

    struct Entry
    {
        uint16_t entrySize; //< This is used for going to the next entry (next = current + current.entrySize)
        uint8_t  entryType; //< 0 for file, 1 for directory + may be extended later
        uint16_t nameLength; //< Now this only stores the concrete file/directory name
        char*    name;
        uint64_t dataSize;
        uint64_t dataOffset;
        Entry*   children; //< Actually an array where entrySize is used for iterating 
                            // and the last entry is a "null entry" which has entrySize = 0
    };

So which one of theese will be better considering that the resource files are "read only" and cannot be modified, only created again? Or is there a solution better tailored for virtual filesystems?

Because in the first case the system only needs to traverse all the entries lloking for "dir1/file1.txt", but in the second case it will have to first search for "dir1" in the root entry, and the for "file1.txt".

I hope that I was clean enough.