Script format.

[Rheini]

And also why we have this support forum. And there's always the list of unsupported formats on the WIKI...

Yeah, I wonder how many scripts have been written by someone else than Mr.Mouse or Watto.

[Mr.Mouse]

Look, I think you made it clear by now that you have an aversion for the script, and that's okay.

[Rheini]

Yes, but I'd really like to know if there are some scripts by other users, has nothing to do with my aversion, I'm just curious.

[Mr.Mouse]

At our forum I know that PXR has created quite a few and Xennex is also writing scripts. Meanwhile, Mike Melanson has been busy with it and pointed the script out to Janusz Dziemidowicz, who recreated the script for Linux http://fusepak.sourceforge.net/bms.php . But you could have known this from our Team page: http://www.xentax.com/?page_id=106

Then I know of people who never come here, but simply use it when they feel like it. In the end, it's much easier to come here and wait for someone to write a script, than do it yourself, especially if you're not really up to the task of figuring stuff out.

Like I said, it's okay to dislike the script, it's not okay to troll about it.

[szevvy]

I'm still of the opinion that 90% of the time, you don't need to script. The way that file formats are described on the Wiki, i.e. just the layout of the file is in most cases readable and usable (with a bit of modification) by an interpreter. I've still got some issues with games that require data embedded in the exe (although that's getting there), but I've managed to port over a large number of games that I wrote stuff for in c++, with a reasonably small custom language:

http://www.szevvy.net/wombat_2_formats.php

It's still a bit rough round the edges, but as far as proving to myself that it works and is worth building an app around - I think the experiment's been fairly successful.

Obviously, however, something like BMS is more powerful in the long run for unpacking game archives - there are some formats that you simply *have* to script for (encryption and compression notwithstanding) - there are formats for which you need to arbitarily seek and that can't be expressed as a 'layout'.

[Dinoguy1000]

There's at least one major problem to using the descriptions off of the wiki, though. The work that would be required to design an interpreter that could use the file descriptions off the wiki and successfully extract files from described archives even 90% of the time would require extremely robust code, for the purpose of being able to identify at least most of the possible variants for field names, as well as error-catching/correcting as it goes. Besides being able to deal with errors in the description itself, though, the interpreter would have to be able to handle spamming of pages, when content often gets destroyed, as well as those pages which don't follow the standard layout. In the end, it's far easier and less labor-intensive and time-consuming to leave the file descriptions as reference tools for humans, and keep the existing BMS language.

As for the question of non-mr.Mouse BMS authors, have a look at this category on the WIKI: Category:BMS Authors (yes, I know, there aren't many scripts listed there, it's a work in progress, just as the whole category system is).