January 2026 - News archive

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