RE: [GD-Windows] GetProcAddress()

[Grills, J. <jg...@so...>]

I do pretty much the same thing -- I have a render layer that I explicitly
load from a DLL.  One of my problems was that I needed my renderer to be
able to use a few functions out of the application that loaded it (warning
logging, etc).  It's actually possible to have a DLL load symbols from an
executable, but the executable name has to be known at link time.  The
problem I ran into is that I wanted to be able to use this one rasterizer
DLL with multiple executables (the game itself, world builder tools, asset
viewers, etc).  I did some research and ended up using the techniques
involved in hooking DLL functions to actually allow the DLL to rebind the
imported functions into the executable that loaded it.  Very nifty.  If
anyone wants more info, I'd be glad to type some more stuff up.  It took me
several days to figure out this trickery, but in the end it cleaned up a lot
of crufty code.

jefftep
Jeff Grills
Star Wars Galaxies
Technical Director, Austin Studio
Sony Online Entertainment Inc.

-----Original Message-----
From: Erwin de Vries [mailto:er...@vo...]
Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2001 4:58 AM
To: Gamedevlists-Windows@Lists. Sourceforge. Net
Subject: Re: [GD-Windows] GetProcAddress()


> A perhaps better way of using DLLs is to have each DLL export one factory
> function for the kind of services it implements, and return an interface
> implementing all the services. All function calls into the DLL will then
be
> routed through this one interface. The interface could consist of a simple
> aggregation of a procedural API, or factory functions for the kinds of
> classes the DLL exports, or something fancier (such as something you can
> query for other interfaces by name). In effect, you'd be hand-rolling
> something COM-like, without the additional management/installation
overhead
> of COM.

Yes! Thanks for the idea. I just tested it, and it is exactly what i wanted,
except for the factory create function, but i can obviously live with that.
=) I knew there must be some way to use DLL's in a normal manner.

> Another approach, if you don't need the run-time loading, is to just let
> your app link against the .LIB link library at link time, and reference
all
> the functions directly. This is still a win compared to statically linking
> everything if you expect some parts of the system to rev much more often
> than others.

Thats not what i want, because i want to dynamically link to our renderer.

Erwin