Substacks

[Shari]

Joe,

I create games and distribute them as shareware to the general 
public.  It creates a much neater package if a program has a lot of 
stacks, and most of them are embedded into one stack, creating just 
one file visually to the end user.

For example, my custom Help stack in the program is embedded.  Any 
stacks whose purpose is to simply be a popup window or dialog box or 
informational is embedded.  Sometimes I embed all of the sounds and 
graphics in one stack, and embed that stack, though I've started 
handling those differently in order to compress them.

It also prevents users from diddling where they shouldn't be 
diddling.  If they can see it, they want to mess with it.  Or move 
it.  Or open it.  Or something.  I've had folks "break" my program by 
deleting files from it's folder.  They don't believe the files are 
necessary, so they toss them.  Programs breaks.  And they end up 
reinstalling.

For the most part, I will embed a stack that doesn't need to save 
it's data.  All stacks that are read only, that do not need to save 
changes, are embedded into the main stack, and then turned into a 
standalone.

If the stack needs to have changes saved, such as a Preferences 
stack, as far as I know it cannot be part of the standalone.  It must 
be a plain old simple stack.  Separate.  So that you can save it as 
changes occur within the program.

I think the short answer would be, it depends on what you are using 
the stacks for.

Suppose you have a program with a myriad of stacks that have 
different purposes.  One user may use stack MultiLanguage every day. 
Another use may use stack PaintByNumber every day.  If you distribute 
a program with these two stacks as separate stacks, you allow the 
users to use only what is important to them, presuming that neither 
stack is called upon unless the user chooses a menu item or something.

Similar to the Revolution engine and IDE being separate.  I use 
Revolution with a separate Metacard IDE.  If Revolution had embedded 
all those stacks, this option wouldn't exist.

(Now we open a bigger can of worms :-)  The battle of the IDES :-)

Shari


>Hi Everyone,
>
>I suppose I'm going to open up a can of worms with this question. What is an
>advantage of using a substack rather than just starting a separate stack? I
>would think separate stacks have an advantage because they can be backed up
>separately.
>
>Joe


-- 
Gypsy King Software
Mac and Windows shareware games
http://www.gypsyware.com