Alternative to wad archive format.

[Siggi]

I was thinking, seeing as most wad editors are far from bugless and on the most part are anoying to work with (espesially for people new to them).
Why not use something similar to Quake 3 and Doom 3's .pk3 and .pk4 files. For those of you who don't know - these files are actually zip files with a different file extension, which allows you to manipulate them with your favourite zipfile manager (like winrar, winzip etc).

I was thinking that instead of using the the tag start and end to show where the textures, floors, sprites and so on are you could have a directory in the zip archive which would contain all the files. eg. a Sprite directory in the archive would contain all the sprites. All the data lumps could be cept in the root of the archive. The only thing that I'm unsure of is how the maps should be stored.

This feature would be usefull to simply make life easier, seeing as it doesn't add anything new, but IMO would be better than wad files.

[ducon]

You can instead propose an integrated wad viewer, for example a wad/unwad couple of programs, like zip/unzip, rar/unrar, ace/unace, tar and gzip/gunzip…

Edit: This couple may be used to navigate in the wad as you can navigate inside a zip file with mc or any good file manager.

[Xaser]

Heh, that's not a bad idea, but how would things such as sprite offsets be stored?

[Macil]

A sprite offset file maybe? I dunno.

[Chris]

Sprite offsets are stored in the image. A WAD file is nothing more than:

Code: Select all

4: IWAD/PWAD header
4: Entry count
4: Directory offset
Directory offset-12: lump data
for Entry count
   4: Data offset (points somewhere in lump data)
   4: Data length
   8: Lump name (Null terminated if less than eight)
end
possible junk data....

Not too bad of a format, but the 8-byte restriction on the lump name is very limiting. Otherwise, one could just use / in filenames and have the editor treat them as a seperator (ie, name a lump "sound/d_thunder.ogg" and the editor would treat it as a file "d_thunder.ogg" in the "sound" directory).

That said, it might not be that hard to use zip files. There's libs around that do the handling for you (zzlib, I think) that run off zlib.

[QBasicer]

We all know zips support comments...use that feature!

[Graf Zahl]

That said, it might not be that hard to use zip files. There's libs around that do the handling for you (zzlib, I think) that run off zlib.

It's definitely not that hard. So far I just had problems to find some library that is usable for this. Most are either far too complex or just a big pain to use.

[Bio Hazard]

doesnt ZDoom use zlib already? for PNG support? why not extend it to zip files?

[Graf Zahl]

ZLib can't handle zip files. It's only the compression algorithm, not the format library.

[MasterOFDeath]

Hmm, maybe some coding from Doomsday could be used (with permission and credit of couse). It supports .PK3 and WAD files. I personally would love to see pk3 support myself.

[Bio Hazard]

um, just FYI: PK3 == ZIP

[Graf Zahl]

Hmm, maybe some coding from Doomsday could be used (with permission and credit of couse). It supports .PK3 and WAD files. I personally would love to see pk3 support myself.

That would be an option. I just took a look at that code and it doesn't seem too bad. It could be a nice project for the future.

[NecromANGEL]

I believe there were an MultiArc plugin for Total Commander allowing to browse wad files like archives and extract/add files, it was making group of lumps enclosed by *_start and *_end look like a folder, and so was it for MAP?? and E?M? records... I don't know where to get it though, I lost it long ago and wrote my own, buggy version of that addon )

[Bio Hazard]

I was thinking of writing a wad manager that used a DIRINFO lump to keep track of that kind of thing. but since I can't find a really good reference on the WAD file format, I can't do it

[skadoomer]

I think i remember randy saying how he wanted to add this feature in about a year or so ago to help those who are developing projects.