Question

I’m trying to make a map for a game that I’m planning to create. The map should have two data files, and a picture file.

I want to put them together, to form a single file, and I only want to use the default libraries.

How can I do this, and still be able to separate them later?

A solution would be compression, but I couldn’t find a way to compress multiple files using the gzipstreamer class.

Answer 1

I think you should consider embedding the resources in the assembly as Erno suggests.

But if you really want to pack them into a single file, you could do so by simply writing the length of each stream before the stream itself. You could then read the length byte and afterwards return the next length bytes as a Stream. Reading/writing with ugly methods below. The target stream could eventually be gzipped. Note that the naive methods below reads and writes the entire string to a single buffer and assumes that no file is larger than int.MaxValue.

But I would not recommend using just the standard libraries.

    static void Append(Stream source, Stream target)
    {
        BinaryWriter writer = new BinaryWriter(target);
        BinaryReader reader = new BinaryReader(source);  
        writer.Write((long)source.Length);
        byte[] buffer = new byte[1024];
        int read;
        do
        {
            read = reader.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
            writer.Write(buffer, 0, read);
        }
        while (read > 0);
        writer.Flush();
    }

    static Stream ReadNextStream(Stream packed)
    {
        BinaryReader reader = new BinaryReader(packed);
        int streamLength = (int)reader.ReadInt64();

        MemoryStream result = new MemoryStream();
        byte[] buffer = new byte[streamLength];
        reader.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);

        BinaryWriter writer = new BinaryWriter(result);
        writer.Write(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
        writer.Flush();

        result.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
        return result;
    }