Non-BSA Data File Storage

[Greendogo]

Hey, I was just wondering if there were any plans let OpenMW use other compression or storage formats besides just BSAs. I would think this is a good opportunity to implement something like this. Is this something you've thought about Zini?

[Zini]

The OGRE resources system can already handle the zip format. There is no need to add anything at this point (though it would certainly be possible).

[Greendogo]

So I can unBSA Morrowind.BSA and put its contents into a zip file? That would be way easier than using BSApack.

Anyway, some extra formats I can think of off the top of my head are rar and 7z.

[Zini]

So I can unBSA Morrowind.BSA and put its contents into a zip file? That would be way easier than using BSApack.

In theory. We haven't tested our resources system much yet and the whole topic is a bit fiddly (handling Windows paths and such). Since we haven't tried zip yet, there is a good chance that something will fail on some systems with some configuration.

Anyway, some extra formats I can think of off the top of my head are rar and 7z.

I doubt we are going to do that. An addition of this kind would best be made in the OGRE project (from where we would automatically inherit it).

[Greendogo]

Alright. Well, in that case I'm going to test this on Windows; I will extract the Morrowind.BSA into both naked files, test it, and then put them into zip files, test it. Then I'll report if this works on Windows, at least.

[scrawl]

Zip files have to be explicitely added in the code, so that won't wok. Unless you put them in resources/mygui/Obliviontt.zip which is already added.

[Greendogo]

The resources work unBSAed.

[Greendogo]

And, of course, don't work zipped.

[Greendogo]

So my original feature request remains, albeit more narrow, can you enable the OpenMW engine to read the zip file format as a replacement for the BSA format?

[Zini]

Right. OGRE can handle zip files, but we need a way to tell it to use specific zip files. Currently not supported.

To early to make a decision. We need to revamp resources handling anyway (post 1.0). Resources packaging should be handled by the editor, so there is a somewhat limited benefit of using a more accessible format. I guess it comes down to which format is more efficient. Quite possible that we keep bsa for legacy support and promote zip as the primary format. But we need to do some testing, before we decide for a solution.