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Author Topic: It's normal that a few of my mods is in.7z and they don't display in my laucher?  (Read 2504 times)

AlexandreFiniou

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Hey ! I have a question, it's normal that a few of my mods is in.7z and they don't display in my laucher? I have Graphics Lib, Ship and weapons pack, Polaris Prime,Audio plus, and Interstellar Imperium who in .7z. Good bye ^^
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pedro1_1

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No, it's not normal to have mods in .7z on the mod folder for more than a few seconds, because .7z is a compression, like .rar, you need to decompress the mods for them to show on the launcher.
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AlexandreFiniou

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But when I download these mods it did not save it to me in the compress folder. So i can't unzip the mod.
« Last Edit: March 10, 2021, 09:26:14 AM by AlexandreFiniou »
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Wyvern

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.7z is an annoying proprietary compression format that a few modders use because they'd rather have a 4% smaller archive than an archive that just works for people.  You have to get a separate application to decompress them; your OS won't do it for you.
« Last Edit: March 10, 2021, 12:56:35 PM by Wyvern »
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Wyvern is 100% correct about the math.

AlexandreFiniou

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Oh ok thank you for your help ^^ Good bye and thank you again
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Tartiflette

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.7z is an annoying proprietary compression format
Quite the contrary, it's a free and open source format, unlike Zip.
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pedro1_1

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.7z is an annoying proprietary compression format
Quite the contrary, it's a free and open source format, unlike Zip.

.zip is a public domain format since 1989, .7z is on public domain since 2008.
I will say this: Microsoft windows not being able to decompress a open format 13 years later is weird, since they did the same thing for .zip in 9 years.
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pairedeciseaux

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Let’s clarify and add a few facts.

Sure, software may be free and open source.

FYI,
https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/z/zip/zip_3.0-11_copyright
http://infozip.sourceforge.net/license.html

On the other hand, format may (1) be royalty-free, (2) have at least one reference software implementation with permissive licence, (3) be properly documented, (4) have several interoperable software implementations, (5) have native support in most common desktop operating systems.

.zip format checks 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5
.7z format checks 1 and 2

Some other formats are better than .7z in these regards, but I won’t bother pushing in that direction. In any case, currently .zip is the best universal file archive format, especially when targeting desktop OS end-users.

That doesn’t mean 7-Zip files are bad (that is, provided you aren't concerned about 3, 4 and 5). It just means those files won’t “just work” for end-users, except when 100% of your end-users are computer geeks using Windows (where 7-Zip seem to have some mindshare for some reasons).
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Nafensoriel

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Zip is everything today. A .doc file is basically a zip file.
.7z is weird but not as weird as pkzip(and the fun with that history).

Either way starsector doesn't read zip for mods. Unpack and enjoy(like beer).
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AlexandreFiniou

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Hi ! Thank you for you answers. So i need a software that can decompressed the file .7z. Thank you ^^
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SapphireSage

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Yeah, you need 7-zip to unpack the files from .7z compression. You can get that from https://www.7-zip.org/.
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