News

Time flies, and today marks the one year anniversary of Jorvik Systems.

The website itself has progressed slower than I anticipated, and I had wanted to have more content up on the site by now. However, I have focused the time available on creating tools and software instead. Below is a list of the Blizzard-related software projects I have created and contributed to during this time.

Overall, I'm very happy with that amount of output. As for the site, a major event was in December, when I wrote a piece about the thirty year anniversary of Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, a post which stayed on the front page of Hacker News for 24 hours and generated quite some site views.

Things have been slow with the site lately, as I've been on vacation with extended travel for a while now. That is about to wrap up in not too long, so I anticipate that I will have some more free time to spend on the site and tools, hopefully.

Yesterday, Thomas Laurenson released version 0.9.7 of mpqcli. I have contributed all the changes in this release, some of which turned out pretty big.

The major thing in this release is game profiles. By using the --game option, you can have mpqcli target the specified game, using the correct compression methods and settings. This allows it to be used to create archives and add files to MPQs for StarCraft I and WarCraft II and all the other games. Great news for us old school guys still digging around in the nineties games!

The full changelist is as follows:

Added:

• Game profile support for create and add subcommands via -g/--game option
• Game profiles for Diablo, StarCraft, Warcraft, WoW, and more
• Game setting override options for create subcommand
• Compression override options for add subcommand
• Support for unfamiliar/unknown locales via raw hex LCID
• Additional built-in locales: ptBR, esMX, ptPT

Fixed

• Subcommands now properly verify locale before operating on files
• Error messages now include locale context in remove, extract, and read.
• MPQ archives are now properly closed across all subcommands
• Non-zero exit codes returned on failure in extract and remove
• list subcommand now shows long output when properties are requested

Changed

• Improved locale printing and display throughout

Find version 0.9.7 of mpqcli here.

(As an aside, when travelling to New Zealand a few weeks ago, I met up with Thomas Laurenson and had a drink with him. Really nice guy!)

In rapid succession, TheNitesWhoSay has released version 2.07, 2.08 and 2.09 of the StarCraft I map editor Chkdraft.

News in version 2.07:

• Have units on classic minimaps render with the appropriate sizes
• Add ability to render classic minimap webps in map_gfx_utils
• Fix resource coloring on classic minimaps

News in version 2.08:

• Add ability to create locations for sprite units
• Accurate mini-map unit display sizes
• Fix map and minimap color displays for remastered colors, fix resource minimap color
• Fix create location menu options updating the layer but not the dropdown box to locations
• Fix trigger string-clearing issue
• Fix actions being added to history when trigger values were unchanged
• Fix blank strings showing up in string suggestions after opening a map with fragmented strings
• Fix resources not reciprocal respecting the mineral distance flag with resource depots
• Fix display of carrier shadows
• Fix a crash that occurred when using non-empty default triggers with new maps

News in version 2.09:

• Improved load time for large scenarios (3-5 times faster)
• Triggering performance improved for maps with large trigger quantities
• Fixed a crash that occurred when compiling text for an individual trigger from the trigger gui
• Fixed a bug where the string editor edited game strings when it should edit editor strings

Version 2.09 is available here.

TheNitesWhoSay have released version 2.06 of Chkdraft yesterday, a map editor for StarCraft I. The tool describes itself as "A remake-in-progress of the beloved Scmdraft to fill the holes left behind".

News in version 2.06:

• Support for DatExt mods and Cosmonarchy in particular
• Add profiles json files and the profiles UI, including live-reloading, replacing the old settings.ini file
• Add ability to drop-to-open multiple map files at once
• Add ability to customize the unit and sprite trees in the profiles json
• Add ability to treat a regular filesystem folder like a casc or mpq for data loading
• Now relies on a stable release of nf hist
• Clang can now be used on linux to compile map_gfx_utils and generate pictures of maps
• Many bugfixes (including and beyond those of recent pre-releases) especially those related to profiles and sounds

The release is available here.

I just made a small fix to MPQDraft. Before, when creating SEMPQs (self-executing MPQs), it used to force you to specify an MPQ and optionally plugins. Now, either an MPQ or plugins are required, i.e. you can now omit MPQs if you specify plugins. This functionality is used by Cosmonarchy, which utilises a hot-loader plugin that downloads the latest MPQs on the fly, allowing frequent updating without having to rely on re-distribution of SEMPQs.

Also in this release are translation of the GUI into Swedish and Korean. Both are AI-translated, with the former language quickly verified by myself while the latter is completely unverified. If you have corrections or want to contribute a new translation, then please reach out.

See the MPQDraft page here, for a download link.

I have on several occations mentioned mpqcli, a wonderful little command line tool to create, add, remove, list, extract, read, and verify MPQ archives using the StormLib library.

Over the course of the past few days, I have made several big and small PRs to mpqcli:

• PR 1 - Small improvement to make it list details if properties are requested.
• PR 2 - Big PR that adds built in support for all games using MPQs up until Diablo III.
• PR 3 - Small improvements to the Readme file.
• PR 4 - Fairly big PR, mainly adding support for unfamiliar locales.
• PR 5 - Improvements to the remove, extract and read subcommands of mpqcli - they will now respect locales, not halt on errors and return error codes to the shell.
• PR 6 - Small PR to fix memory leaks by closing the MPQ archives properly after reading.

Especially PR 2 is a big deal for those of us who want our MPQs compatible with older games. Previously, mpqcli always used Zlib compression, which meant older games could not read the files. With this PR, the user simply specifies what game they target and mpqcli will choose the appropriate compression algorithm based on the files the user wants to add. I mentioned this back in early December, and now we have what is hopefully a pretty solid implementation.

The maintainer of mpqcli, Thomas Lausenson, seems to have been fairly busy as of late, but hopefully he can give feedback on the PRs or merge them fairly quickly.

The calendar now shows 2026. I hope your previous year was splendid and that the new one will be even better!

To kick the year off, I'm releasing MPQDraft 2026-01-01. Compared to the beta releases I have previously made, it does not contain much worth mentioning, but it is the culmination of what I have done to modernise the code base during the past two months.

Download page

Overview of the changes:

• Completely rewritten GUI in Qt. It has a few more features than the old and is more structured.
• More help for the user, with texts that explain what things do.
• Ability to patch games without built-in support.
• CLI that can do all that the GUI can (except configure plugins, which for technical reasons is not feasible from the terminal in a pretty way — if you want to configure a plugin, use the GUI once and then the plugins in the CLI should have the same settings)
• Support for adding custom icons to SEMPQs.
• Cross-compilation is now possible. Using MinGW-w64, one can now compile the code from a Linux machine (Mac too presumably). All MFC code has been removed. MPQDraft itself is still very much a Windows 32-bit only program though, but at least you no longer need a Windows machine to build it.

The title screen by Joel Steudler remains the same as it always has:

The first public release of MPQDraft by Quantam (Justin Olbrantz) was on 2002-01-01. Given the date, I figured that today, exactly 24 years later, was a good date to release this revamp. Let me know if you experience any issues.

Download page

I want to wish everyone happy Yule festivities! Midwinter in the northern hemisphere has passed, the days are now slowly becoming longer.

Whether you celebrate something or not, I wish you all happy holidays and end of the year.

Just a little while ago, Thomas Laurenson released version 0.9.6 of mpqcli. The main highlight is a bugfix for MPQ signatures by him, and support for locales added by me.

MPQ archives uniquely identifies files by hashes of their file names, locale and platform (only one platform has ever been observed and the platform is thus usually ignored). With this release, mpqcli has support for listing, adding and removing files with different locales.

I have just released MPQDraft 2025-12-22 beta, with a CLI interface that has feature-parity with the GUI (with the exception that plugins cannot be configured from the CLI — use the GUI once to configure any plugins, and then the plugin should have the same settings saved for later when you run it through the CLI).

I was a bit worried that the CLI would turn into an overly complex beast, but I decided to use CLI11 which made things very smooth. I am reluctant to bring in any third-party dependencies, but this one is a single C++ header to include, so I figured the trade-off was well worth it.

In other news, I have made a dedicated MPQDraft page with a description of the program and a download link. So, find a download link to the binaries at the MPQDraft page and as always, find the source on GitHub.