Release of the PACK tool (for packing/unpacking/repacking M2TW PACK files)

[Tellos Athenaios]

New version, which brings a few code simplifications. Features & behaviour remain the same.

[Tellos Athenaios]

New release. Fixed a crash when creating directories on Windows.

[Tellos Athenaios]

New release, this one fixes some inverted logic (if/else) which causes packing certain files to fail. To trigger the bug you would have to have a file for which only the last "chunk" of data is incompressible.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Update:

Fixes

• Fix missing include (stdio.h) in util.h
• Fix bad handling of the output pointer at slurp(), in util.c. Fortunately, in the case of the PACK tool this bug would not "manifest" itself during runtime.
• Fix opening sentence in the ReadMe, proving nobody ever reads those.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Another update. This one fixes a bug which caused the tool to crash (due to segfault) when unpacking uncompressed data (chunks).

[Tellos Athenaios]

Version 0.7 of the PACK tool is available now. It brings some major improvements to the tool to make your life a lot easier when using it.

Features

• Maintain a consistent ordering of the files in the PACK. Previously this depended on the order in which files are supplied, but it appears that Medieval II: Total War wants them sorted.
• Avoid packing duplicate files. Previously pack -a some.pack duplicate.txt duplicate.txt would pack the file duplicate.txt twice, no longer. It prints a warning about the second duplicate.txt instead. Duplicates are not removed if they already exist in the pack, however.
• Parsing logic for -t, --text, -0 and --xargs options is now more lenient. Empty strings (lines) are silently discarded instead of triggering a failure to pack. Closing delimiters for the last entry in the parsed file are no longer required, either.

Bug fixes

• Fix memory access warning in the parsing logic which deals with the -t/--text options.

Misc

• Output of the -l, --list commands is now sorted and in-order as well.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Version 0.8 brings the following new features:

Features

• Add -z/--no-compression and -s/--small-files options to disable compression. The --small-files option is meant to mimick behaviour of "Medieval II: Total War" PACK files, it disables compression for files of <= 1024 bytes (1kiB).
• Picked a more aggressive compression algorithm (lzo1x_999 vs lzo1x_1), yielding smaller results at the cost of (significant) extra run time and memory consumption while packing.

Misc

• Use the 'safe' LZO decompression algorithm variant which performs sanity checking of arguments passed by the pack program. This should make the program resilient against malformed input data. Also added some logic to print additional error messages indicating the specific error condition when compression/decompression fails.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Turns out there is a nifty optimisation feature built in to the LZO library. Let's use it, in version 0.85 of the PACK tool:

Features

• Use the LZO optimisation feature. This 'optimises' compressed data to make decompression slightly faster (1-3% according to the documentation).

Misc

• Add a section to the readme on compatibility with "Medieval II: Total War"