DRD Team

With my mod {link edited back in out of protest}, picking up two TerrorSphere powerups causes the game to freeze. However, terminating GZDoom's process from the task manager allows the crash report system to come up, so I'm able to post this dump:

I'm tempted to ignore your link because you posted a RAR.l How often do I have to repeat that RARs are annoying as hell because you can't use them directly?

Fortunately this was fixable without it.

Graf Zahl wrote:I'm tempted to ignore your link because you posted a RAR.l How often do I have to repeat that RARs are annoying as hell because you can't use them directly?

From my FAQ:

Q: Why do you use RAR files? What makes them better than ZIPs?
A: I use them because it's convenient for me and it saves space in the long run. If you have any hostility or dislike towards RAR files, deal with it - I'm not going to upload ZIP versions of the files just because some people don't like the format I've uploaded them in.

Your hostility is needless and immature.

I have said several times that I don't care about space savings. I care about ease of use and for those who don't use WinRAR regularly they are a major pain.

And just FYI, I will continue with this policy. I am not the only one who finds RARs more than annoying and if space is so much more important for you, well, you will see what happens.

Well isn't this just pissant. Especially overlooking that you do not need WinRAR in order to decompress RAR files.

You need something to do it!

...and your excuse (and others) for not having a small program around to do it is? You say you use Total Commander which supports decompression of those files. On top of it, most modern knockoff compressors have RAR decompression (not to mention those other lovely ones like 7-zip) so what's the problem?

The biggest problem I am having is that I use a lot of tools that can search Zips and tar.gz's but not RARs (Total Commander being the one and only notable exception.) Which means that I can conveniently find anything stored in the common and free storage formats without ever having to unpack them (so I can dump them in an archive folder and search for specific content whenever I need) but everything that comes in a RAR I have to look for manually. So my only choice is to re-pack them after download.

How often do I have to tell that RARs, while more efficiently compressed are severely lacking in flexibility of use? The purpose of archive formats is not just to compress them as much as possible as the RAR defenders seem to imply. If you only use WinRAR or 7Zip to handle archives you will never notice how annoying these files are. You seem to reduce the value of archives to the maximum available compression and that's just wrong.

I find it interesting that Ian seems to have no problem supporting decompression for music within RARs and 7-zips wtih his music player via plug-in. Perhaps he does not share your attitude concerning inflexibility of archive formats. All I can say is that the plugins make my life much easier for those who insist on using it. Not that I make RARs or anything (or even use 7-zip archiver, I'm using TUGZip)

It all depends on how you use archive files. When in a real-time environment like a game that constantly reads and discards resources the penalty of opening solid archives is utterly prohibitive. It takes far too long to read from them. That's the nice thing about Zip. It can be accessed randomly like a WAD with just the additional step of decompression - and zlib is designed to be fast so it is perfect for this.

And at some point there's also the danger of overkill. I really see no point to support different archive formats just for the sake of doing so. GZDoom is not a program that is designed to handle archives of any imaginable kind. It just needed something better than WAD that is also easy to handle. And that's Zip.

Quake 3 and Doom 3 doesn't support RARs... no one's complaining...

Compression Wars: Return of the Graf

Seriously what's the big deal with using zips? You can create zips in Winrar and 7zip anyway!

I'll make this clear- I have no beefs with using zips myself. What didn't make sense to me is why solid archives were so heavily discriminated, and I still don't- nothing stops people from extracting the file(s) to some temp folder if constant access is required.

Solid archives have one purpose: Distribute a large number of files with better compression. For everything else they are just one big pain in the ass. But it is obvious that you don't care about that. That inevitably happens if your only way of access to them is some more or less shitty packer tool.

And I repeat myself again: Why do you want to force me to unpack your files? It is much more practical to me to keep them in the archive.

I think the point that is missing is convienence.

If the (editing) tools don't support the format you want and the performance for decompression is poor when you want to do stuff on-the-fly, then Graf has a point.