Hey Dug,
I'm not sure about making a dll that contains media, but I can say that if you could, it wouldn't speed up the loading process anymore.
This is because DB takes all the media when using the "Load..." commands, and converts them into its own internal format which works best for the app.
With MemBlocks, I am not even sure if there is a way to Load them in, without doing it manually ( opening a file, reading the info, and putting it into a MemBlock ), is there?
If you mean that you just want to read in some information, and hold it in 'storage', then, sure a MemBlock can do that for you, no worries. But, it won't really give you a speed increase, other than you not having to manually open a file, read in the data, then close the file.
Another good thing with the MemBlocks ( I may have said this
), is that you can use the 'Make MemBlock From ...' commands and then have direct access to the metadata of the information you converted to a MemBlock.
Such as a Sound, you can access the data that makes it up, or a Model, you can access all the informaion that goes up to make a Mesh.
With DB, you probably shouldn't be aiming for too low end machines.
Code can be optimized a fair bit when it comes down to it, but even after that, you'll still have some troubles getting DB apps running on really low spec machines.
I usually Guestimate, saying that about a P2, 1Ghz, with 128MB would be the lowest I'd bother trying it on.
But, again, that's different for different situations.
Just think about your code logically, and in 'Computer' terms ( as if you were a computer ).
The computer is stupid, it follows EXACTLY what you tell it, it doesn't have common sense, and thus, anything that may hurt it ( ie, extreme memory usage etc ), it will still go right ahead and do it.
Run through what you have on paper ( even if it is really massive, then do the individual modules seperately ), and think "Well, this For Loop can be combined with that one... And, I have this variable which I can use as a flag, so that it doesn't neeed to do all of this part here when it's not needed" etc etc.
Hope that helps a bit
Jess.
Team EOD :: Programmer/All-Round Nice Guy
Aust. Convention!