Suggestion 7z Support

[Viridis00]

Just a tiny suggestion. I use 7z for my archival over rar and zip just because it has better compression and 7z is free. It's almost as common as rar and zip nowadays, so you guys should consider allowing 7z uploads for the community content section.

 

[Megacrafter127]

Just a tiny suggestion. I use 7z for my archival over rar and zip just because it has better compression and 7z is free. It's almost as common as rar and zip nowadays, so you guys should consider allowing 7z uploads for the community content section.

For the modding section, .jar may also be very useful, as it is just a zip file with a different suffix.[however, unlike zip files, double clicking on executable jars starts the JVM. it would help with installers and such]

 

[AndyP]

7zip is to my knowledge only available for windows.
Why should we allow a format that is not available for all platforms?
Zip has native support without the need to install additional software on most operating systems.
Also, the internal format for starmade blueprints is zip, so a downloaded zip compressed blueprint can be renamed to sment to make it a blueprint.
Or for example rename a .sment file to zip and extract it to put it directly in your catalog without needing to through the import system.

And for the effort to "zip" it instead of "7z" it, there is no real difference:


Same for all dialogs for 7zip,
its only a dropdown change to make it a zip and not lock out all non-windows users.

- Andy

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

7zip is to my knowledge only available for windows.
Why should we allow a format that is not available for all platforms?
Zip has native support without the need to install additional software on most operating systems.
Also, the internal format for starmade blueprints is zip, so a downloaded zip compressed blueprint can be renamed to sment to make it a blueprint.
Or for example rename a .sment file to zip and extract it to put it directly in your catalog without needing to through the import system.

And for the effort to "zip" it instead of "7z" it, there is no real difference:
View attachment 22468

Same for all dialogs for 7zip,
its only a dropdown change to make it a zip and not lock out all non-windows users.

- Andy

Wow I didn't know that sment and zip were interchangeable, good to know. I personally ovoid files in 7zip, I don't know anything about the compression rates but I do know I never have anything installed on my computer that supports them. Zip can be handled natively in windows without any additional software.

 

[Viridis00]

7zip is to my knowledge only available for windows.

Nope, it's available for Linux as well, and an unofficial package exists for Mac, too. I think that's pretty neat about zips and sment sharing the same structure and all, but when I'm uploading an archive it's always because I'm uploading multiple things into one file. Like backup sments for modular components in my current case. Anyway, like I said, 7z is far from an obscure format and I think more options are always a good thing.

 

[AndyP]

Well, I am not against more options, but please do not underestimate the outcome:

If we allow 7z,
we should also allow tarballs, dmg files and so on.
It IS possible to extract them on any platform,
but not without additional software.

And browsing our community content
should not require a set of compression programs
just to be able to view all uploads there that are NOT in sment.
I personally even consider .rar to be not suitable for it.

- Andy

 

[Megacrafter127]

I personally even consider .rar to be not suitable for it.

It isn't suitable on most linux distributions without additional software.