Question

I am using Allegro 5 library. I want to load font from dat file. In Allegro’s previous versions, there is useful methods for this. For example “load_datafile”, load_dat_font. How can I do this in Allegro 5?

Answer 1

The closest direct thing Allegro 5 has is the physfs addon. Useful links:

• http://www.allegro.cc/manual/5/physfs.html

• http://icculus.org/physfs/

With it you can load (for example) a Zip archive as a folder. So instead of using a datafile, you can use a Zip file.

See the manual for an example. In short, it looks like:

PHYSFS_init(argv[0]);
PHYSFS_addToSearchPath("data/foo.zip", 1);
// ...
al_set_physfs_file_interface();

Then future calls to al_load_bitmap() (etc) will look inside that zip file.

If you want to do anything other than that, you will need to write your own custom file interface. It’s not terribly difficult, but I think you might as well use a Zip file.