Supporting a Wide Range of Devices - Marmalade SDK Mobile Game Development Essentials - page 229

file rock\rock.group.bin 0 dz
file skier\skierskiing.group.bin 0 dz
file sound\sound.group.bin 0 dz
file tree\tree.group.bin 0 dz
file ui\ui.group.bin 0 dz

The first line uses the archive keyword to specify the name of the Derbh archive to
be created, which is normally given the extension .dz . It is possible to create several
archives at once by simply adding further archive entries.

The basedir keyword allows us to specify a directory in which to search for the files
that will make up the archive. In the previous example we specify the directories
data and data-ram\data-gles1 .

Next we list all the files that will be added to the archive using the file keyword.
The first parameter is the name of the file to include, which should be relative to one
of the directories specified by the basedir keyword. This is followed by a number
and a compression type. The number refers to which archive the file should be added
to, with zero being the first archive specified in the DCL file.

There are a number of compression types available, although note that not all of
them actually compress the source file! We can use a different compression type for
each file if we so wish. The following table shows the types available:

Type Description

lzma Uses lzma compression, which generally gives the best compression

ratio and has a reasonable decompression speed.

dz Marmalade's own compression format, which gives a good compression

ratio and decompression speed.

zlib Uses zlib compression, which provides a less optimal compression ratio

but has a very good decompression speed.

zero A block of zeros the same size as the file will be added to the archive.

Can be used for debugging purposes, for example, if we need to detect
corrupted files.

copy

The file is included uncompressed in the archive. In the case of a file
type that is already compressed, this can produce a smaller end file size
for the archive than trying to compress the file.

With the DCL file constructed, we can then build the archive file using the DZip
utility. This utility can be found as the file tools\dzip\dzip.exe in the Marmalade
SDK install directory.