Write PAK from engine

[qbism]

An idea, don't know if it's a new idea...

"SAVEPAK" console command- Saves all the resources required for the currently loaded map into a new pak file.

Why? To reduce file size of distribution. An example would be a Flash demo tailored to a single map.

[leileilol]

I thought of this same idea the other day but applied to Q3. You know, for making OA Lite or something. I currently do it by hand with using the output of a shaderlist, soundlist, modellist. A command that'd just extract all files loaded would have been ideal, though the shaders would need a bit of work (like maybe tossing out mapname_models.shader (for models/mapobjects only) and mapname_textures.shader)

[Spike]

maintenance nightmare...

but the biggest issue is copyright.

I thought q3map2 already generated pk3s with the extra textures and stuff. suck pk3s contain nothing from the core pk3 files of course.

[mh]

Certain content is only loaded on an as-needed basis - I'm thinking mostly about the menus here. You'd also need to change how this content gets loaded for this to work.

I suppose it would be easy enough in theory to filter out the ID1 stuff (and Rogue/Hipnotic if necessary) but you'd need to deal with the case where someone has unpaked or modified their original PAK files too. Yuck.

[qbism]

Justin T. created the Clean Q3 project. One goal is to pull the ID content-specific hacks out of the engine code and put it into the game code. It could be done to Q1 engines as well. Any content with a specific file name goes to QC. The point is that it's one step toward tracking content.

Perhaps a modified COM_LoadCacheFile function could be the central clearing house for all content loading, determining file type from the extension. And other things like optionally dumping a complete cache and tracking path. Developing a TC (like OA) or a mod can leave a lot of leftover baggage. Someone packing up a mod would want to strip out items with ID or Quoth or Drake paths.

I'm picking up a train of thought that started last year with tedious manual reduction of content to make this demo load as fast as possible: