   Compiling Time On Auto-Generated Header Files
  I'm thinking of creating a tool that will create all kinds of game entities like maps, characters, units, etc.  For the code to reference these entities, we need handle names, so the tool will need to generate header files containing handles for these entities.Now, the problem is that there will be a lot of auto-gen header files, possibly tons of them in a large project.  And so the compiling time for the code will be quite long, probably longer than most people's comfort level.  I can't put these files in a precompile header because these are auto-gen files and will be modified on each asset processing.  So the question is, is there a viable way to optimize this?  I can probably not modify a header file if nothing is changed, but if auto-gen header files start to reference each other, then it will likely need to recreate all files no matter what.  I'm hoping there's a more clever way to cover all situations.   
  Load them at runtime. Why go to so much trouble to hardcode all these things into the project, when you could probably just as easily make a system that loads them dynamically?   ;  Why does the code need to reference the entities directly? This is a symptom of a bad design decision somewhere along the line. It should be possible to do everything you need in a purely data-driven way so that the code only acts on the defined entities and their characteristics, without "knowing" anything specific about any particular entity.   