DarkRadiant locks game DLL

[sparhawk]

I was a bit surprised about that. I had DR running and when I tried to put a new DLL into the darkmod.pk4 I couldn't because it was locked. I was not aware that DR opens the PK4/DLL. Why would it need that?

[greebo]

DarkRadiant opens all PK4 to initialise the virtual filesystem. I don't know why it keeps it open/locked though, maybe this is required for instant access to the contents?

[sparhawk]

It's a bit annoying in our case, because we only have the DLL in there, but I guess in the general case it would make sense. If I put new assets in there, I would have to reload anyway, right? Or is there an option to reload the assets without restarting? But DR starts much faster then Dedit, so it's probably acceptable. Since I'm the only one who seemed to have noticed it, it doesn't appear to be a big issue.

[greebo]

It's a bit annoying in our case, because we only have the DLL in there, but I guess in the general case it would make sense. If I put new assets in there, I would have to reload anyway, right? Or is there an option to reload the assets without restarting? But DR starts much faster then Dedit, so it's probably acceptable. Since I'm the only one who seemed to have noticed it, it doesn't appear to be a big issue.

I don't know exactly if reloading the assets without restarting works, I guess the VFS can be restarted, but I don't know if any module dependencies break when doing so. I also noticed the PK4 lock when updating the mod from SVN and I once thought about implementing an "ignore list" for PK4s that shouldn't be searched by the VFS.

 

In case you didn't know, there is a "Refresh Models" command in the file menu and a "refresh shaders" command in the TextureBrowser toolbar - I can't say for sure if those take newly created files into account that weren't there at the first startup.

[sparhawk]

Don't worry about it. Having a ignore list might not be as usefull though. After all, we only have the DLL currentl in the pk4 because it's easier to develop this way. I also extracted all original assets from Doom 3 to the disc, because it makes it easier to search and look at them. I think when we release, we should combine everything into PK4 just like D3 was, so most of the mappers will probably use it that way and the DLL would then be just file in a pk4 out of many. Unless we always keep the DLL in a seperate pk4.