Problems with mods #1: Packaging and compression format

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## Problems with mods #1: Packaging and compression format

Continuing previous thoughts, I need ideas and brainstorming on this. Mods come in all variances of compressed formats. A quick glance into my small collection shows me at least: zip, 7z, sit, rar, bzipped or gzipped tarballs, executable installers. This would not be a problem for a collection that is just an archive. Let the user handle it. But in a perfect world one could install and launch those mods with the Quake Injector. And for that we would need zip archives with a directory structure that can be extracted straight into the quake directory or a directory within.

For the current map archive I manually repackaged almost 5% of the files to fulfill that requirement. My archivist heart bled but I did it anyways (and added notes about where to find the original files).

Does anyone have insight on mod files? Most surely are zip and hopefully well packaged but what amount of possible repacking should one estimate? And can anyone think of a good way to handle the repacking while at the same time prioritising the archival part of it all? Last but probably most important, would anyone be willing in doing the actual work?

13.02.2011 in quaddicted.com | 7 Comments »

### 7 Responses to “Problems with mods #1: Packaging and compression format”

1. mh Says:
   14.02.2011 21:44

   I vote for zip. Other formats may be technically superior, but zip can be decompressed on any machine, and 99.9999% of Windows users can decompress them without having to install any extra software (a very important factor for non-techies).

2. Spirit Says:
   15.02.2011 15:50

   Oh, there is nothing to vote about. Zip is the lowest common denominator and supported by the Injector, that is a fact. :-)

   My questions are what to do with the non-zip files.

3. negke Says:
   15.02.2011 17:30

   It’s a tough call. I guess you wouldn’t get around repacks for some of them. It’s a bit like with maps: mods that only come with a progs.dat in the archive, those with additional content in subdirectories, and pak files. Some have all the stuff in an additional root folder – these would warrant a repack or at least an extra argument in start options.

   Seems to be considerably more work than the maps.

4. RickyT23 Says:
   15.02.2011 21:51

   I’ll do a couple of re-packs if it will help. Mail me and tell me which mods you would like me to do :)

5. D3L0R Says:
   17.02.2011 14:10

   Hi.. I must repeat myself.. is it really necessary to extend the mighty Quaddicted to mods stuf’ ?

   Me myself got all Quake mods ever published and I can say most of them are a total mess in terms of quality, presentation, packaging (many are also password encrypted! ie: QuakeForever)

   Spirit, you’ll have to face an enormous task.

6. dfsp_spirit Says:
   20.02.2011 11:54

   Password encrypted? Holy shit, I haven’t seen that in many years.

   And I never bothered to search the internet for the password or some cracking app, I just delete them and move on to something else.

   As D3L0R said this sounds like a horrible amount of work and it may be a better idea to have some quality mods than just ‘all’ of them.

   I could do some re-packs, I can only start at the end of May though.

7. goddogx Says:
   23.03.2011 19:41

   since the original purpose of this site was to be a comprehensive and usable archive of sp maps, is that now considered completed? i’ve submitted quite a few that haven’t been listed yet, and i am continuing to search my totally sprawling game files for more.

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