[Idea] (zip) compression?

V-man · Post by **V-man** » Tue Sep 13, 2005 22:50

Support for Doomsday high res texture packs was already added. As far as I know, these come in .pk3 files which is in fact .zip. I have not used Doomsday this year and when it was just added there, it did not support compression but I'm not sure if it still is uncompressed.

Could please zip support be added for the .wad files? I just did a little testing and found that all the game wads (chex.wad, chex2.wad, chex3.wad, doom.wad, doom2.wad, gzdoom.wad, heretic.wad, hexdd.wad, hexen.wad, lights.wad, plutonia.wad, strife1.wad, tnt.wad and voices.wad) are almost 190MB in size!

Using Ken Silverman's zip utility, kzip (which produces pkzip compatible files), I was able to cut the size down to slightly less than 80MB.

The zip format is one of the best known file formats, it's fast and easy to use, I think. Could you please think about it, Graf?

Several years ago I once had a port that had a "compress WAD" utility. To bad that I never saw anything of it again as I think it was a good idea. And with everybody here being able to extract a zip file again to use it with another port, there are no problems with compatibility.

Post by **Graf Zahl** » Tue Sep 13, 2005 22:54

I really have more important things to do now. Maybe later.

V-man · Post by **V-man** » Wed Dec 21, 2005 13:32

So - thanks a lot for the .zip support!

But I have a few questions/suggestions.

The game already allows zipped WAD files to be dragged onto the exe and even gzDooms main ressource gzdoom.wad itself was changed to pk3.

Could zipped IWAD support also be build in? As I stated in my post above, it would save some of us (who have all the WAD games) more than 100MB if we had Doom.pk3, Doom2.pk3, Heretic.pk3 and so on instead of the uncompressed WADs. So far the game ignores them. I tried dragging them onto the exe, but it will not accept them as it seems not to support compressed IWADs.

At start the game scans if the IWAD files are present. If they are - ok. My suggestion would be that for example if Hexen.wad is not found, the game looks for a Hexen.pk3. That means that existing WADs are prefered if there are both types, but PK3s accepted as well, as a substitute.

The other thing is with the extension .zip or .pk3. Enjay suggested DZF for Doom Zip File. I like the idea of other file extensions, but I don't like this one much. And I guess, it's the same for everybody; we all have good ideas how we'd call it.

My suggestion is however another one:

What about adding a new part to the config file, allowing to add customized extensions the game accepts and treats as zip? While this first sounds like useless stuff, I think it is not.

What I was thinking of was binding different extensions to different IWADs. I'd suggest (just examples, everybody could use his or her own ones) d1c (Doom 1 Compressed ressource file), d2c, hec (Heretic), hxc (HeXen), stc (Strife). They'd all be treated like zip.

This way we could have windows assign different icons to them and dragging for example a .hec file on gzDoom will automaticly load it with the Heretic IWAD.

I quickly made two icons just as an example. (Yeah, I know, I lack any skill...)

What do you all think about it? And what does Graf think about it? My point is that now that we have much more possibilities we shouldn't stop half-way there.

Post by **Graf Zahl** » Wed Dec 21, 2005 13:48

V-man wrote: Could zipped IWAD support also be build in? As I stated in my post above, it would save some of us (who have all the WAD games) more than 100MB if we had Doom.pk3, Doom2.pk3, Heretic.pk3 and so on instead of the uncompressed WADs. So far the game ignores them. I tried dragging them onto the exe, but it will not accept them as it seems not to support compressed IWADs.

No. The game needs to pre-analyze the IWADs and that can't be done that easily with ZIPs.

Post by **Enjay** » Wed Dec 21, 2005 17:15

V-man wrote:it would save some of us (who have all the WAD games) more than 100MB...

Is that really much of an issue these days? I've got all the IWADs and I have multiple installs of them all - the original DOS versions, at least 4 different Zdoom installations, plus derivatives and then other ports too. However, with modern HD sizes, all those installs together hardly blip onto the disk use pie chart. If the difference between having expanded and zipped IWADs on your HD is so critical, it's time to get a new (bigger) HD. A single install of any new game will easily take up more space than all my Doom (etc) installs added together.