Virtual Filesystem lamalove

Technical stuff. We're using a virtual filesystem to load game content now. This means addons don't access your harddrive directly (but still can for now, will probably have permissions or something later). The obvious benefit to this is that addons can't try to delete your Windows folder or do other stupid things. But there's a lot more to them. We start with an empty filesystem and then mount the things we need. For example if we wanted to load Half Life 2 assets we just find the files on your harddrive then mount it to /hl2. All this means is the Half Life 2 files show up in the /hl2 folder in game. That's useful but it's not the interesting part. That mounted a folder but we can mount any filesystem. That just means anything with files in it, real or not. We can write some code to read those VPK files and mount them too. Then the importers can read those files the same way you would if they were on your harddrive. Addon folders are mounted into /Addons on demand so you won't see addons that aren't in use. When an addon is loaded from the server we just mount it from the content server filesystem instead of your harddrive and the rest falls into place.