Feature request: Load png and mp3 from packed files

[JaumeAlcazo]

So far we read images and music and fx from loose files in the folder of the application.

This is fine, altough it looks not very professional when distributing the application. I mean, users can navigate the folders and see the images, sprites, music, and fx as loose files.

Many applications distribute the .exe, the .dlls and then one or more packed files containing all assets.

So I thought it would be a cool feature to be able to zip some files or pack some files somehow and then be able to read them directly with tilengine.

An extra would be to be able to encrypt the packed files to avoid easy scavenging and misuse of assets (graphics and sound).

Best regards.

[Domarius]

I notice a lot of games just write their own pack format, which is just stringing the data of the files end to end with some sort of table of contents at the top.

[megamarc]

Yes, everybody uses its own packer. I've developed one for my job many years ago with basic encryption, it's the way to go.

Please notice that the loaders in tilengine (all the TLN_LoadSomething() that reside inside LoadSomething.c modules) were open sourced from the beginning, because they're just example implementations to write your own loaders. All the hard work is done by the TLN_CreateSomething() functions, that are what the loaders ultimately call to build the resources. The tilengine core isn't tied to any specific file format, using the standard loaders as a working reference one should be able to build their custom loaders.

As tilengine is just a rendering library, the loaders themselves are something foreing that sits on top of it, just as the built-in windowing: they're there for convenience and reference, but can be overriden as they're not part of the core.

[JaumeAlcazo]

Thank you very much for your answers.