& More MPQDraft

Well, looking at the SourceForge statistics, a few interesting things became apparent. First, there's still a remarkable amount of interest in MPQDraft, even after all these years. MPQDraft, released some 7 years ago, was originally targeted at Starcraft, which was released in 1997 - 11 years ago; while this has remained the primary target of MPQDraft and modders, MPQDraft has also been used to a lesser extent with Diablo II (8 or 9 years old, I think) and Warcraft III (7 years old, I believe). Given the fact that the most recent of those is still 7 years old, it's pretty surprising that MPQDraft is still heavily used today. As the graph indicates, over the last year, MPQDraft has been getting an average of 600 downloads/month, and trending upward, with 750 downloads last month.

I'm a bit curious what happened in November that produced such a huge rise in download count - about a 6x increase from September to November. The first thing I thought of was the announcement of Starcraft II, last year; however, this was quickly found to be incorrect, as SC2 was announced 6 months prior to that. So I'm really not sure what caused that increase. I can only imagine some very large site related to Blizzard games (Blizzard themselves or one of the major modding sites) linked to MPQDraft's recent home on SourceForge at that time.

The other surprise is the seeming lack of interest in the source code. According to the SourceForge statistics, there have been fewer than 50 source gets to date. I'm curious whether that's at all related to the fact that I'd only made the source available through Subversion (the source version control system I use for MPQDraft). To test that hypothesis, I've posted a package containing all the source on the SourceForge download page. You'll need to take a look at the notes (separate from the ZIP file) for what you need to get the code to build.

& MPQDraft

Well, it's been a while. After I registered the MPQDraft project on SourceForge last April 1, I procrastinated for so many months that many people suspected it was an April fools' prank; however, the only prank that was intended was the fact that it wasn't a prank. One year after then, I finally got around to posting the complete patching code, although I'm only just now getting the last of the GUI code uploaded. This is to say that the code on SourceForge is now complete, and MPQDraft is now fully open-source.

Relevant links:
The MPQDraft project
Binary download page
Web-based source code browser
Instructions on downloading the source code
The OSS license it's licensed under

Gah

Random fact of the day: Microsoft Developer Network library no longer gives information about what versions of Windows prior to 2000 support some functions. For example, MSDN does not list support for CreateFile in any versions of Windows prior to 2000, despite it being in every single 32-bit version of Windows (Windows 95 and NT 3.1 onward).