On the topic of embedded files, my advice is to make a zip archive, stick it on the end of the exe and load it from there - this is easy because opening your own exe file and scanning back from the
end a bit finds the end of central directory data, which has the offset to the beginning of the central directory (file listing) and just seek back to there and begin parsing it.
Note however that tools like unzip and winzip and so on are more than happy to identify exactly such an exe and extract the zip on the end, they think of it as a self-extractor (as that is how they
are made).
Data hiding is futile in any case.
On the plus side as Cristoph points out, loading data from a zip is generally faster than from raw files on disk, for a couple of reasons - 1. the files are packed together (no empty space between
them) which means file cache is better utilized (rather than rounding up to the cluster size), 2. the zlib inflate algorithm is one of the most finely tuned algorithms out there, and comes close to
the performance of memcpy, this means that it takes significantly less time to decompress the file than it would have taken to read a longer file from the (often slow) physical media.
If you really would prefer embedded files inside your executable, you may find my tool useful:
http://svn.icculus.org/twilight/trunk/lhbin2c/
This tool (lhbin2c) produces not only a series of initialized arrays containing the file contents, but also an array of file information so that you can simply scan through it for a requested filename
and return the address of the file data (the plus side of a memory file is that it is already loaded).On 10/18/2011 05:20 AM, Christoph Harder wrote:
If you compress the files you can use sdlrwops or some library like physfs to load ressources from the archive. And compressing might actually improve loading times.
But encrypting is totally useless it wastes processor cycles for a false sense of security and since your application requires the key to unencrypt them every user can look into the .exe and find out
what the key is.
And even using a private key for encryption and a public key for decryption is time that you could better spend elsewhere. What stops the user from modifying your binary and insert his own key.
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LordHavoc
Author of DarkPlaces Quake1 engine - LadyHavoc's DarkPlaces Quake Modification
Co-designer of Nexuiz - Nexuiz Classic – Alientrap
“War does not prove who is right, it proves who is left.” - Unknown
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.” - James Klass
“A game is a series of interesting choices.” - Sid Meier
