Now that Christmas celebrations are beyond us, it’s time for an update on my two flagship projects. My plan is to release a new binary version of Riven X, MPQKit and mpqfs within the first week of next year.

The Riven X update will include over a year of progress in the project, including functional hotspots, allowing for the first time to explore Riven without having to entirely rely on the debug console. Numerous bug fixes to graphics and audio rendering, better error reporting and many new Riven Script opcodes will also be part of this update. If time allows, I will also include support for the CD edition and card transitions.

The MPQKit update will focus on bug fixes and may be the 1.0 release of the framework. Once that is out the door, I will be planning a 1.1 release to add some less-often needed features, such as the ability to sign new archives using your own certificates. Also, I will enhance the existing test suite (which is admittedly small right now) to cover most of the import code paths in the framework, namely opening and writing archives, reading files, listing files, adding files and deleting files. Finally, I will commit to the repository an external patch adding GNUstep support and release a binary version for Linux thanks to that patch.

The mpqfs update will focus on bug fixes, performance and Linux support. The next big update will introduce write support. I do not know exactly when that will be (there are some difficult problems to deal with in order to have efficient read-write support), but I expect it will be around March.

Until then, happy holidays!