Analyzing 2,200 Mods to Design an Archive Format For Modding
As part of the Reloaded3 project, I am designing a new archive format to serve as a container for game mods, both for distribution and loading of assets.
As discussed in my previous article on texture compression, this format is built to satisfy four key requirements:
- Read-Only Virtual Filesystem: Make games read file from Archive as if they were on disk.
- Efficient Distribution: Minimizing size and supporting streaming downloads.
- Legacy Replacement: Capable of replacing native game archives with superior performance.
- High-Speed Archival: Decompression speeds matching modern NVMe drives (GB/s).
To do this, I sat down and wrote a quick tool to analyze the existing mods that are out there. I wanted to look at all Reloaded-II mods (or as close as possible). The easiest way to do that was the Reloaded-II.Index, the same index where the built-in mod browser pulls its data from.
This resulted in a dataset of 2,197 unique packages; after excluding duplicates, etc.