Under certain circumstances you may wish to store binary files within an executable. This can be useful in several circumstances:
May provide performance benefits by eliminating filesystem latency.
For example, scripted plugins such as BitmapSourceScript need a “default” script when they are first instantiated. These “default” scripts could be “embedded” in the plugin source code as multiline strings, but the necessary escaping makes authoring and modification difficult. Ideally, programmers should be able to edit such resources as external files, using tools specific to the filetype, then “embed” the files in an executable directly without manual modification, and access them at runtime. The K-3D resource mechanism provides just such functionality.