Asset Class Generator Updates
Over the last couple of weeks I've been thinking a lot about the idea of packing game assets into a single file for my Otter projects. Back when I was using Flash, and Game Maker, a compiled game ended up only being one main file. I always liked how simple the game would appear to be to a player. Just a zip file with an exe! There's no way you could mess that up.
In the wild world of programming with C# usually all of my assets end up being in a folder alongside the exe. This allows players to go through and view any asset the game could possibly load, and even modify those assets if they so choose. While this can be pretty cool, it also makes it tough to keep secrets.
Now I know the whole idea of "no matter how much effort you put into trying to hide stuff in your game people can still decompile it and hack it and see everything." Yeah, that is totally true, but I feel like that is only usually about 1% of all players of a game, and if I can put in just a little effort to hide secrets from most players I think it's worth it.
So with all of this in mind I made some updates to both my Asset Class Generator, and Otter. The Asset Class Generator can now pack assets together as bytes, and Otter has a static Files class that can load in assets that were packed by the generator. None of the files are encrypted or anything, but if you wanted to do something like that yourself it wouldn't be too difficult.
You can download the latest build of the Asset Class Generator from my open repository kpulvtools. Check out the details on how to use it here.
So far with tests in Super Sky Sisters this method works pretty well, and instead of a sprawling mess of folders and assets I can now just include a simple "data.pak" file along with the exe and dll files and off it goes. Now if only I could get rid of these pesky dll files somehow!
In the wild world of programming with C# usually all of my assets end up being in a folder alongside the exe. This allows players to go through and view any asset the game could possibly load, and even modify those assets if they so choose. While this can be pretty cool, it also makes it tough to keep secrets.
Now I know the whole idea of "no matter how much effort you put into trying to hide stuff in your game people can still decompile it and hack it and see everything." Yeah, that is totally true, but I feel like that is only usually about 1% of all players of a game, and if I can put in just a little effort to hide secrets from most players I think it's worth it.
So with all of this in mind I made some updates to both my Asset Class Generator, and Otter. The Asset Class Generator can now pack assets together as bytes, and Otter has a static Files class that can load in assets that were packed by the generator. None of the files are encrypted or anything, but if you wanted to do something like that yourself it wouldn't be too difficult.
You can download the latest build of the Asset Class Generator from my open repository kpulvtools. Check out the details on how to use it here.
So far with tests in Super Sky Sisters this method works pretty well, and instead of a sprawling mess of folders and assets I can now just include a simple "data.pak" file along with the exe and dll files and off it goes. Now if only I could get rid of these pesky dll files somehow!
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