Updating Deutex for modern times

[Blastfrog]

First off, apologies to Ling for starting another idea thread. I think this would be better off in its own thread, however, and isn't just my typical insanity. Hopefully you'll make a small exception, here, I'll chance it.

 

Anyway, Deutex is still quite useful, Freedoom still uses it. However, it could use a facelift, for sure. Having to manually define patch offsets in a metadata text file is tedious, and GIF is a pain to deal with these days for use in a resource fork. Deutex doesn't even support transparency, you have to use a stand-in color. Support for PNGs with their own offsets would make life a thousand times easier.

 

There's also the fact that the currently maintained version is not distributed with binaries and you have to compile from source if you want to use it and not a crusty old 16-bit DOS binary as the last official version was distributed as.

 

Maybe it could even be absorbed into SLADE?

 

Thoughts?

Edited May 28, 2017 by Blastfrog : "Esoteric" "You keep using that word, I do not think that word means what you think it means"

[Voros]

Yessss. Updating Deutex has been on my mind for months now. I've really begun to appreciate the usefulness of Deutex, given how it can be used to manage big WADs easily.

 

Like I said before, my coding skills aren't that great, and Deutex's code is pretty big.

 

I wanted to add a small thing once: recognising MID files, because renaming music to MUS is strange. I initially thought that it would be easy enough, just need to find the code that checks for MUS files and add MID alongside it. But I gave up as the code kept going over my head.

 

On Github, fabian (?) asked for a raw extract mode, meaning no conversion upon extracting. This code is kinda in there, via -get, but you can only extract one lump at a time. I thought a hacky solution would be a command that would run -get on each lump in the WAD would work, but damn that code is confusing.

 

If anything, Deutex can be updated by anyone, although no one has much interest for it.

 

[Giomancer]

I believe chungy was considering updating it himself, though I last heard him mention that years ago.

 

David Hill has a nice little suite of programs, one of which is called the GDCC Wad Archiver, which, as may be expected, packs and unpacks wads. As far as I know, however, it can only create a pwad from scratch, though it certainly doesn't have trouble unglomming whatever wad you throw at it.

[Voros]

Judging from the source code, it seems to do only packing and unpacking. Deutex has more features that makes easier to handle WADs. Graf's WADExt seems like a better choice over this one.