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
_______________________________________________
use-revolution mailing list
[email protected]
Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription 
preferences:
http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution

Reply via email to