There is just NO advantage of using DLLs nowadays; at least not for a (simple) game.
Sure, you could claim that you save a few K of memory (but .exe files are demand-loaded anyway, aren't they - in Linux they are, what about Windows?), but I think that's pretty irrelevant.
If your game exe is, say 10M (of code+initialised data, not including linking data and debug stuff which doesn't need to be in memory anyway), and you have 100M of data (which is pretty smalll really), then you might save 2M by making an unused part of your game engine a DLL.
It really is a pointless, premature optimisation, for no particularly good reason.
Use DLLs if you HAVE to, and not otherwise.
That's true, though to put it in the same context as your original post -- when was the last time that a major game gave you the option to choose between DX8, DX9 or GL?
These days I'd just have one executable per platform --
one for Win XP (with the DX9 renderer compiled into it),
one for Linux (with the GL renderer compiled into it),
one for Mac (with the GL renderer compiled into it), and
one for Win Vista/7 (with the DX11 renderer compiled into it).
[quote name='Hodgman' timestamp='1317974241' post='4870019']
That's true, though to put it in the same context as your original post -- when was the last time that a major game gave you the option to choose between DX8, DX9 or GL?
These days I'd just have one executable per platform --
one for Win XP (with the DX9 renderer compiled into it),
one for Linux (with the GL renderer compiled into it),
one for Mac (with the GL renderer compiled into it), and
one for Win Vista/7 (with the DX11 renderer compiled into it).
You fall back to the highest supported Feature Level then, be that 9_1/2/3 or 10/10_1. If 11 or 11_1 is supported, great! Otherwise, just follow the fall back route. DX8 is deprecated as shit; forget about it. DX9 is still highly relevant, ofc, but less so as XP sees the last rays of light and Vista/Win7 takes over. Since DX11 can use the feature set of DX9 there is no need for DX9...unless you are still supporting XP, which is fair enough I guess. In a couple of years though, that will have changed...
That's true, though to put it in the same context as your original post -- when was the last time that a major game gave you the option to choose between DX8, DX9 or GL?
Sometimes it's just so they can get that bullet point on the marketing material!
Yeah, turns out that source engine just puts its dlls into a folder derp. (I downloaded hl2 from my steam account and checked)
I thought that having a large exe was generally bad because you have more 'cache misses' or something when you get instructions.
Am I wrong here?
That smaller exes are generally faster?
Does instruction caching work exactly like data caching? (I imagine it would but...)
EDIT:
You don't strictly NEED 'run time modularity' for anything afaik. But people still use it for whatever reason.
I'm doing it simply because, so, maybe that's it.
Actually, using DLLs is more likely to increase instruction cache misses, because the DLL code is loaded into separate pages of memory by the OS. So when jumping between code in the .EXE and the .DLL, you're crossing a larger memory span than just jumping around within an .EXE.
