Game expansion design pattern

General Discussion
1

Hi

I tried searching for it both on google and these forums, but still haven’t found out:

Is there a design pattern for developing game expansions?

How does it work ? Is it another JME-project entirely ? How do you check in the original game what expansions are installed etc. Anyone have any documentation as to how it works?

Kind regards

2

I’d suggest making a separate jar file for the extension content, especially the assets. You will currently have to do the split by modifying the build process though (ANT). In future versions of the SDK we’ll add direct support for this, also to split assets per platform (e.g. separate GUI xml files for mobile) or “quality” (e.g. texture resolution).

3

Okay, so a seperate jar file. But this doesn’t explain to me how to actually check if an expansion is ‘installed’ etc. Or am I misunderstanding your answer?

4
@asser.fahrenholz said: Okay, so a seperate jar file. But this doesn't explain to me how to actually check if an expansion is 'installed' etc. Or am I misunderstanding your answer?

I think your question is unclear. Are you trying to figure out how to find the jar file? (java.io.File.listFiles()) or how to load classes from it? Or what?

This is a pretty huge topic as there are approximately 3,204,486 (+/- 2 million or so) different ways to embed extensions into a Java application.