
Time
comes, and time goes. What was once new is now old; and what is now
great will soon decay. Such is the way of all the world; people,
places, things, and even computer programs. When I wrote MoPaQ 2000,
almost three years ago, it was something totally new, and desperately
needed by the community. At the time we knew how to view MPQ archives,
and do great things with the files inside of them, but we did not yet
have an effective method to actually work with the MPQs themselves. In
fact, it was really Lelik who did the work of the LMPQAPI editing
engine; I simply wrote a nice user interface around it.
Nevertheless,
once released, MoPaQ 2000 spread like wildfire. In December of 2000,
MoPaQ 2000 had 2,300 downloads; 13,000 in 2001; 10,000 in the first 8
months of 2002. A sharp downturn took place on September 17, when
Desler attacked the CC server. Average downloads fell from 35 per day
to just 2. Honestly, I don't know why so many people were still
downloading it, up until then. MoPaQ 2000 is almost three years old,
and very clearly showing its age. I never bothered to update it to
support Starcraft 1.08 or 1.09; nor did I update it to support
Warcraft III's new compression method.
After
helping ShadowFlare make SFMPQAPI to replace LMPQAPI, I figured that
everybody would just switch over to WinMPQ, as it not only provided a
graphical interface, but it could also run MoPaQ 2000 command lines
and scripts. But they didn't. Not even in the end. I suppose I can't
blame them, as up until the most recent version (released earlier this
month), WinMPQ was hideously slow. But now that WinMPQ fully uses
SFMPQAPI, that issue has been taken off the table. So, this is your
last notice. MoPaQ 2000 is finished. It's obsolete. I've left it up
solely for programs that still rely on it. It's time to move onward
and upward. I leave things in the capable hands of
ShadowFlare and
WinMPQ. |