I have been working with VB.NET and C# and one of the DLL converters for making plugins.
Was wondering if there is a way to load directly into the object array or memblock array from a DLL.
The idea I had was this:
You can send objects, images, and sound to memblocks... and memblocks can be read one byte at a time... so it should be relatively small work for someone with experience pak file type formats to make a custom format that can store these types of object in a custom pak file.
These could already be used in DBPro via plugin DLL that can read the format and send the file data to DBPro which you could then load into a memblock and then back into the appropriate type of file... all without having to unpack the file to disk. You can see the advantage to people that don't want to have their resources that they have worked hard on stolen by anyone.
The problem is, while it can be done this way, you would still need extra DBPro code simply to load it into the memblock. This is slow. It would be a lot faster if the plugin DLL could just output the memblock directly with a command like:
LOAD RESOURCE TO MEMBLOCK "myshipobject", "mypakfile.pak", 1
The first parameter would be the internal name of the resource in the pak file, the second is the filename of the pak file, and the third is the memblock to load it into.
Even easier would be:
CREATE OBJECT FROM PAK "myshipobject", "mypakfile.pak", 1
I would be perfectly happy with the first way however.
The question is, how would I either create (best case) or access and already created (second choice) memblock from within my plugin DLL?
Design documents?!? What design documents??? I thought we were just going to wing it!!!
