It's finally ready!

[notthecheatr]

The long-promised, and in some cases long-awaited, Game Resource Archive (GRA) system!  After much debugging, fixing, writing documentation and example programs, and general mayhem, I've finally decided I'm ready to release.  I may add some more things later, but I can't keep adding things forever - eventually I've got to release.  Lachie particularly wants me to release it so he can use it for his game.

So here it is at long last.  Full HTML documentation is included, as well as plenty of examples.  There is also something called selectable file system which should be especially helpful to game writers;  it allows you to switch between loading from a GRA and loading from the file system, so while testing you can load from the disk (making it easier to make modifications to important files on the fly) and when you're ready to release you can put everything in a GRA.  Note that you can also copy files from GRA to disk, which is helpful if you have text files in the GRA and you want to be able to use FreeBASIC's text file routines (Input #, Line Input #, etc.)  There are tons of features and the best way to find out about them is to download the whole thing.

Enjoy!  Any bug reports/suggestions/requests/comments/etc. should be posted here.

http://notthecheatr.phatcode.net/downloads/gra.zip

[Lachie Dazdarian]

That's very nice, only, can I access BMP files from my GRA files without having to extract them on the disk, and how?

Then again, I can delete them right after I load them, right?

Anyway, I tested the compression and it really didn't compress the only BMP file I placed in my GRA file.

[notthecheatr]

Only if you have a BMP-loading routine.  fbpng lets you do it from memory, but if you're doing BMPs you'll have to extract to disk, load, then delete.

Yes, that's how I'd do it.

I believe that's been fixed.  Stupid bug

[Leonheart]

Nice  Finally that deflate64 can be useful. Just because I'm retire from game-dev-tools for some month (d*rn crazy non-fb project with over than 10000 code lines  ), I still don't forget about plan to load bmp directly from memory (and other format too like tga and gif)  .
Maybe we can colaborate after it finished? 

You with your "GRA" format and me with "mc²" format with the same component? 

[notthecheatr]

It's certainly a possibility.  Your mc² format was part of what inspired me to make GRA.  And of course I used your code for compression