Originally posted by Trivial Psychic
Perhaps the coders could help get around the clutter of hundreds of maps for an eff by having the eff file look for a subdirectory with the same filename (minus extension). All the maps required would be in the subdirectory. That would reduce clutter would it not? Again, I'm not sure if that's a headache to code or not.
Good idea but not really possible. It would require some horrible CFILE hacks to make that work or some work arounds that are equally as bad. If anything the EFFs will be made into a container, one file with all of the images packed in it. This makes it a little more difficult to create in the first place as well as use since the file loads don't work with like that yet. The EFF would work more like ANIs at that point. And before anyone asks, both the current and the new container format would be supported so you don't have to worry about current EFFs not working at some point in the future.
I really think that it would better for everyone to use VPs in the near term rather than letting their data/ directories get tons of files thrown about them. Whenever DaBrain or Lightspeed comes out with something new I just toss it in a VP so that I can easily update or removed it. Most of this is obsolete with the new MediaVP but here is what I have as an example: ma_beamz.vp, ma_dabrain.vp, ma_he.vp, ma_hipoly.vp, ma_lsd_sg15.vp, ma_thrusters.vp. Makes things much easier to deal with.
