June 2026 - News archive

For StarCraft I modders, one of the best set of tools has for a long time been PyMS, a graphical tool suite that allows several file types to be modded.

The author, poiuy_qwert, has been hard at work converting the source from Python 2 to Python 3, and writes:

Hey all, I've been putting a lot of work into the python3 version of PyMS recently, but again I only have time to work on the tools not to actually use them, so I need to lean on others to use/test the programs and report any issues. If anyone is able to play with them please let me know!

See here for how to raise any issues.

Also, while the source of PyMS has been available for a long time, it has so far been without any explicit license, but poiuy_qwert just now released it under the MIT license.

Find the Python 3 branch of PyMS on GitHub.

StarCraft I and Warcraft II use TBL files to store game strings for things such as unit names, dialog strings, game tips, mission dialogs etc. Roughly a year ago, I wrote a little utility, IronTbl to convert these TBL files to TXT files and back.

I recently decided to give IronTBL some love and fixed some minor bugs and issues, and spent some time hardening it. So with that, version 2.0.0 is now out.

The previous --mode flag is now replaced by proper subcommands — since this is a breaking change for the interface, I bumped the version to 2.0.0 even though the release doesn't offer any new features.

IronTBL 2.0.0 is available on GitHub.

Thomas Laurenson seems to have figured that yesterday's 0.9.10 release of mpqcli merited a version bump, since it is a rather big release.

He also included a contribution by me to add the compact subcommand which defragments an MPQ archive, thus shrinking it in size if it contains any gaps from previous adds or removes.

So, version 0.9.10 is not available anymore, but instead version 0.10.0 of mpqcli is out!

Thomas Laurenson just released version 0.9.10 of mpqcli two hours ago. As previously covered here, mpqcli is a tool for creating and modding MPQ files, used for loading custom data into games.

Both Thomas Laurenson and myself have made several contributions to the release, which is rather large:

Added

• Support passing multiple files to the add and remove subcommands
• Support reading file paths from stdin in the add and remove subcommands
• Support adding entire directories with the add subcommand
• Add an --update flag to the add subcommand. When given, files whose archived size matches the on-disk size won't be added to save time.

Fixed

• extract subcommand now reports an error when the output directory cannot be created
• Path traversal guard in extract uses fully resolved paths, closing a potential bypass
• Crash when reading strong signatures from malformed or truncated archives
• Docker glibc image updated to ubuntu:24.04
• Adding files is now ordered and operating system agnostic
• add subcommand now returns non-zero exit codes on failure
• Error messages now include StormLib error codes
• Duplicate error messages removed
• Makefile build targets corrected

Changed

• The --path flag on add now acts as an archive path prefix when a directory is given, and the full name when a file is given.

Removed

• --filename-in-archive and --directory-in-archive. They are now replaced by a unified --path flag

Find version 0.9.10 of mpqcli here.