Incbin - Is it worth it?

Should I incbin all my media or leave it out of the exe?

I'm asking because if I were to make changes to the exe eg. bug fixes, I would have to distribute the exe with all the incbinned media again and that would take too much time, especially if there's lots of fixes needed.

What about packing all the media in to a seperate file? How could I do this?

It would definately save incbinning the media in tot he exe and make distributing exe updates easier.

What do you guys/gals do?

Leave it out. My engine works such that I can pack things into seperate resource files ala' Quake N, Doom 3, etc. It's nice, because in order to patch something, all I have to do is create a new package and add it into the game directory, and the new code, possibly art, etc. is used in place of the old.

I'd recommend doing something like that. It's not hard, you could use the PhysFS module I released a while back for it too instead of writing your own resource code. Either way, it's a useful solution that makes updates easy.

Thanks Noel. I was just messing about with MoleBox and it does pack media to a seperate file.

Running some tests it seems to work even when I make changes to the excecutable.

I'm having a few problems though when packing a dll as it seems to not want to start so I may leave the OpenAL dll's out the archive.

I'll look at your module though to see if it's easier than just moleboxing.

I've got to test compatibility with MoleBox also as I've heard of people having problems with moleboxed exe's.

I use Incbin now instead of Molebox - I get a lot of reports of random crashes *only* in Windows98, which simply doesn't happen if I avoid Molebox.

Amon - don't know which version of Molebox you have, but only the Pro version supports packing of DLLs. The cheaper one doesn't.

You can not pack up DLLs with MoleBox, only with MoleBox Pro as stated in the feature list.


never had any problems with their exe but Avira (Free AV) is too stupid to not recognize molebox pro packaged apps as a virus (it sees the molebox pro as such not the app)

Yeah I have Molebox Pro and it packed the dll properly with no problems it's just that it wouldn't play the music with the dll packed.

Not only that but ASProtect doesn't like moleboxed exe's so I may have to go back to incbinning my media.

I think Mark should make an addition to incbinning where it would allow packing to seperate file.

Sure it does not like it.
Each of them has their own CRC check etc. so they interfer with each other.

Either pack everything up with ASProtect or Molebox Pro.

Incbin to a seperate file, like DBPs pak feature would be an interesting thing.