All Kaiju Combat releases are installed to a single directory - probably "Kaiju Combat." At some point in this directory there are individual directories created for each installed release. Each of these "release directories" has resource directories for characters, environments, and game modes.
Kaiju Combat can draw data from any or all of these directories - as dictated by the
Loader Screen.
In addition, the game might send monster or environment data to be loaded by other machines, if they don't have a local copy of that data. This means that Player A might use monster "a" from our first release, and Player B might use monster "q" from our seventh release, and the two players may play against each other even though they do not own any of the same content.
To support this modular content loading, it is important that all art assets, audio & scripts associated with each monster / environment be collected in that resource's load bundle. This means each monster has her own locally bundled SFX and VFX. Some aspects of these resources, such as particle effect textures, may be stored as part of the global resource bundle. Players with out-of-date versions of the core executible (and thus potentially different versions of the global resource bundle) will not be able to play online.
In addition to supporting cross-release online play, this resource system allows us to NOT load resources which are not currently needed. This is important for a living game, as eventually the number of monsters & environments will be far too large to load all at once.
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