Having a bit of time free, I’ve elected to work on my games resource sub system. Overall, the whole game is a lot like Id Tech 3 in architecture, because it’s exactly the kind of architecture I want, even if I don’t want to put up with the engine that powered Quake III: Arena so excellently.

For the resource loading, what I want is for a configuration file to define what packages should be loaded, kind of like a PATH for zip files. When something needs to be loaded, it’ll be be found at a path, like foo.zip:/what/file.ext— telling the sub system to locate foo.zip in the game or user data directory, then return a handle to the /what/file.ext stored inside of it. As opposed to the more Id approach, where file naming, e.g. pak0.pk3, pak1.pk3, … controls the loading order, I want my game to use a config file to handle that. Because personally, I think having to remember which machine friendly name a resource resides at, is a pain in the arse for making maps and mods >_>.

Because I’m running things very light on dependencies, mostly because compiling stuff on Windows is a bitch (stupid programmers) and many useful items are not easily available on FreeBSD. So things will probably be built on top of zlib, using contrib/minizip as an example of using zlib with the ZIP format.