This is a cool contribution. I'm aware of James' idea, and yes that would make it even more user friendly.

My idea is to place all trees at level , after we can save it to file. It will take a long time for big level.
==> Instead you can make your level's scaled top picture and draw your tree positions using some small shapes with different colors.

After you can make some functions which will determine tree positions (X,Y) from picture and also you should find Z poistions using TRACE function and write tree's (X,Y,Z) positions to INI file.

Looks cool. How about for multiple levels, with different tree.ini files? And how about security, couldn't someone just edit the tree.ini and mess up the level? Instead, why not leave all the tree models where they are in game, and then store each one's position in an array when the level is loaded, then destroy it. Sure, it might take another second to load, but it'll get rid of those issues I stated.

Hi Nadester,

1. If you have multiple file you can make different INI files and after changing your one level you can open tree_5.INI file for this level.

2. About security, I am using INI files for my cars, trees, lights, traffic lights, traffic rules, task_points, etc ... About security i have made following solution :
- Change your all .INI file's extension to .PAK file
- bind all your .PAK files to your .WRS archive.
- At startup you have to load all your INI files. Then use file_cpy function to extract and copy your .PAK files from .WRS to .INI files.
- After call your READ_INI functions.
- That's it !

If some people want to change your ini files, it has no effect. You will overwrite your ini files from your .WRS at every startup of your game.

That still isn't secure, just hides it a bit better.

Why it is not secur ? You can encode your INI files. It is up to you.

I remember Napo's old INI DLL allowed you to read/write to an encrypted INI file.

I always add a checksum to my files, and if needed also for ini-files, but normally ini files are for changing something, mostly by user, so why make them unchageable? so if you dont want a file to be changed, create your own format.
A dll plugin wouldnt be bad.

link dead?
Code:

---

Not Found

The requested URL /dynamic_trees.rar was not found on this server.
Apache/2.0.52 (Fedora) Server at wap.starsoft.mn Port 80

---

Link seems to be down , anyone have this script , in it's original state or altered , sounds like a very good solution to having many entities per level , being limited to a certain amount is unideal for city levels and the like , if anyone has this send me a PM , thnx in advance.