CookOnTheFly and FileExists

I’m using cookonthefly to serve files to a console target. My project uses my own plugin, which dynamically loads my custom DLL.

There’s one dynamically-linked DLL, and a bunch of binary data files. They are located in Engine/Binaries/ThirdParty/Simul/{PLATFORM}.

My problem is that, in my plugin’s source code:

FPlatformFileManager::Get().GetPlatformFile().FileExists

returns false. This is because the files exist in the PC directory structure, but have not yet been deployed. By stepping into the NetworkPlatformFile class, I have been able to gather that the engine/binaries directory is ignored by CookOnTheFly, because it assumes that everything there is already on the target machine. But it isn’t.

So:

  1. Is there some way I can specify that these files should always be deployed on startup? or
  2. Is there some other location I should place a custom dynamically loaded (i.e. not linked) DLL where CookOnTheFly will work? or
  3. Is there a way to force NetworkPlatformFile to get a local copy of missing files even if they are in the local directories?

Thanks!