I've been mulling at this one for a while and could use a bit of direction, if someone has experienced in this sort of thing.
In my program I want to store data such has images, models, and memblocks into files with additional meta data that links different information from different files together.
For example, a model package would contain a bunch of models with some additional meta data that identifies custom parameters like which textures are compatible, which project it is associated with, file format, file name, alias, parent group name, notes, unique id, etc.
An image pack would contain a bunch of images with meta data as well.
I could then write out a map format that built upon all only this meta data from these packages.
What I'm struggling with is trying to figure out how to store the data into a single file with the meta data and then how to read it out
without extracting it.
I've looked up information on file blocks from the enhancements plugin, zip/rar plugins from the forum, etc. and haven't found any solutions. Reading the pack file/writing to disk/reading the new file/deleting the file, then rise and repeat for every file becomes very redundant and insecure. Why can't the data be written straight to memory instead?
Even the enhancement pack file block commands seem to do this:
Files contained within a File Block can be easily extracted to disk and then used within a Dark Basic Professional program.
The problem I've had with some of my ideas is that even if I read and image or model file to memory the LOAD OBJECT command requires a file name.
So now I'm stuck. Can anyone offer some ideas on how this problem might be solved?