How do you Unbuild CvGameCoreDLL.dll?

[Kailric]

Ok, so I did everything I was told and built my first CvGameCoreDLL.dll. But now how do I unbuild it to edit things? Is this even possible? I would also like to unbuild some other .dlls to check out and compare code.

 

[Shqype]

Unfortunately, you can't. All you can do is work from the source files, change what you want, and recompile. There's no way (that I've heard, at least) to "uncompile" a .dll.

 

[Kailric]

Unfortunately, you can't. All you can do is work from the source files, change what you want, and recompile. There's no way (that I've heard, at least) to "uncompile" a .dll.

Thats what I was afraid of. I guess its that way to prevent people from stealing code so easily I had a feeling it was that way. Just compiling takes so damn long, you can't make simple changes then recompile at any convenient pace. Anyway to speed things up in that sense.. I am using the CodeBlocks way is any of the other ways faster?

 

[Gaius Octavius]

I think if you keep the destination DLL in the same place you can quickly edit changes and then recompile. At least, that's what mine seems to do. It doesn't take as long to do it once you've already compiled the first time.

 

[Refar]

Decompiling the dll is more or less impossible (and probably illegal as well).

Many Mod's will release they source files however, so you can check out the code without the need to unbuild the dll...

 

[Kailric]

Decompiling the dll is more or less impossible (and probably illegal as well).

Many Mod's will release they source files however, so you can check out the code without the need to unbuild the dll...

Good to know, I learned something else today

 

[Kath]

Thats what I was afraid of. I guess its that way to prevent people from stealing code so easily I had a feeling it was that way. Just compiling takes so damn long, you can't make simple changes then recompile at any convenient pace. Anyway to speed things up in that sense.. I am using the CodeBlocks way is any of the other ways faster?

Depending on the compiler/linker when you make minor changes it should only build what you changed and link the already compiled sections with it.

In Visual Studio, after compiling at least once it will reuse already compiled sections (The .obj files, one is created per class I think?) when linking if they haven't changed. This means that its faster as it will only compile the class/classes affected by the change.

Of course if you change something deep down that affects a lot of classes it will have to go through them all again but it still shouldn't take long. For example the Source SDK (For Half Life 2) takes me 20mins to compile the first time, after that any small-ish changes (like adding a weapon) only take about 1-2 mins at most to compile.

I don't know if CodeBlocks works like Visual Studio in that regard. Visual Studio Express is free and provides some very useful tools too so it's worth a download to try it out.