Supporting a Wide Range of Devices - Marmalade SDK Mobile Game Development Essentials - page 227

The binary versions of resources are generated automatically for us whenever we
load a GROUP file, assuming we have the ICF setting ResBuild set to 1 and we're
running a Windows debug build of our game. These files are written out with the file
extension .group.bin into a directory called data-ram , which lives alongside the
regular data directory where our source assets reside.
If we look inside the data-ram directory for any project, we'll discover another set
of subdirectories and these are what contain the binary versions of our resources.
These subdirectories correspond to the extra prefix directories that we specify in
our build styles.
When the .group.bin files are written out, they will always be written to the prefix
directory specified by the currently active build style, regardless of whether the source
file was read from the standard data directory or from the extra prefix directory.
The relative directory path from the data directory will also be created in the output
directory when writing out the binary versions of the files.
This makes it very easy for us to deploy different sets of resources to different
platforms as we just need to include all the .group.bin files from one of the
subdirectories of data-ram .
Let's illustrate this with a quick example. Suppose we have a file data/images/
images.group that loads in a number of textures. If no build style is specified, the
default is the Marmalade-defined GLES1 style, which specifies a prefix directory
called data-gles1 . The binary version of the file will be written to the file path
data-ram/data-gles1/images/images.group.bin .
If we now run our program again, with the pvrtc build style selected (as defined
in the section on build styles earlier in this chapter), the images will be converted to
PVRTC format and instead written to the file path data-ram/data-pvrtc/images/
images.group.bin .
As it happens, Marmalade does not just write out the binary versions of the GROUP
files, it also creates a number of other files that can be useful for debugging purposes.
We won't look at these in detail in this topic, but you might ind them useful to
take a look at if you're having problems with some resource not being processed as
expected. In particular, there is a file with the extension .group.bin.txt that details
all the classes encountered while processing a particular GROUP file.