DevUrandom wrote:
The sense of this "wrf-replacement" was to have something that makes you able to tell what files a level or a unit design or a model or a complete mod needs and whatever else you might want to know about it. Metainfo so to speak...
this is far too bothersome to do with code pages of any sort...
if you want to package things together, the simplest solution is to... package them together. probably the easiest way is to use subdirectories and cross references (too bad windows doesn't support simple filesystem stuff like symlinking or this'd be really easy for a cross-platform solution):
any unique thing like a map will have all dependencies (such as map-dependent scripts) either physically present in the map's subtree, or listed in something like a .references file which holds relative paths of all non-unique dependencies. then when mods files are parsed, any file collisions (any mod that specifies the same fully pathed filename as another one to be loaded) go to whichever mod has priority, or via mod-dependency specifications.
this doesn't really help or hurt things from the engine point of view - preloading is just as easy, however, it saves the modder a whole lot of time (as a warzone modder, i've spent many needless hours digging through wrf's, sorting path problems, etc), since the actual path structure is authoritative: if a file is in the .wz file, it's valid, and doesn't require some file-manifest file to say it exists.
