MPQ Archives

The StormLib library

History

When Diablo I was released, many people were looking for a way how to play the music and sounds from the game. Soon, tools started to appear, that used Storm.dll library (shipped with the game) for reading data from the game MPQs. Blizzard was aware of that and since version 1.04 of Diablo, Storm.dll contained tricks to prevent people from using it to read game archives. Althought these tricks can be overcame, people started to look for an alternative how to read (and also to write) MPQ archives without relying on Blizzard library.

The first library that was able to write MPQ archives was LMPQAPI, created by Russian programmer Andrej Lelikov. The library utilized StarEdit.exe and allowed to call internal functions that were able to create MPQs and add files to them.

Tom Amigo was the first guy who released a Stormless MPQ Editor, which was able to read (and also write later) MPQ archives without using Storm.dll. At about the same time, (year 2000), I started to reverse Storm.dll in order to get a working, public C++ code that is able to read MPQ archives. As a result, StormLib v 1.0 was released. As of today (year 2010), StormLib is still being maintained and is currently able to read files and add files to MPQ archives.

The StormLib library

The StormLib library is a pack of modules, written in C++, which are able to read and also to write files from/to the MPQ archives. The original version was written for the Win32 platform. There is also a Linux port, made by Marko Friedemann and a Mac port, made by Sam Wilkins. The library is free, no license is needed to use it in your projects. You can download it from the Downloads section. Should you find any problems or or malfunctions, please, let me know and also send me the MPQ archive that caused the problem.

StormLib funtions

All StormLib functions are defined in StormLib.h header file. You can also download the entire documentation for offline browsing.

Manipulating MPQ archives

Using patched archives

Reading files

File searching

Adding files to MPQ

Compression functions

Example

Here is an example of a function, which extracts one file from the archive.

//-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Extracts an archived file and saves it to the disk.
//
// Parameters :
//
//   char * szArchiveName  - Archive file name
//   char * szArchivedFile - Name/number of archived file.
//   char * szFileName     - Name of the target disk file.

static int ExtractFile(char * szArchiveName, char * szArchivedFile, char * szFileName)
{
    HANDLE hMpq   = NULL;          // Open archive handle
    HANDLE hFile  = NULL;          // Archived file handle
    HANDLE handle = NULL;          // Disk file handle
    int    nError = ERROR_SUCCESS; // Result value

    // Open an archive, e.g. "d2music.mpq"
    if(nError == ERROR_SUCCESS)
    {
        if(!SFileOpenArchive(szArchiveName, 0, 0, &hMpq))
            nError = GetLastError();
    }
    
    // Open a file in the archive, e.g. "data\global\music\Act1\tristram.wav"
    if(nError == ERROR_SUCCESS)            
    {
        if(!SFileOpenFileEx(hMpq, szArchivedFile, 0, &hFile))
            nError = GetLastError()
    }

    // Create the target file
    if(nError == ERROR_SUCCESS)
    {
        handle = CreateFile(szFileName, GENERIC_WRITE, 0, NULL, CREATE_ALWAYS, 0, NULL);
        if(handle == INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE)
            nError = GetLastError();
    }

    // Read the file from the archive
    if(nError == ERROR_SUCCESS)
    {
        char  szBuffer[0x10000];
        DWORD dwBytes = 1;

        while(dwBytes > 0)
        {
            SFileReadFile(hFile, szBuffer, sizeof(szBuffer), &dwBytes, NULL);
            if(dwBytes > 0)
                WriteFile(handle, szBuffer, dwBytes, &dwBytes, NULL);
        }
    }        

    // Cleanup and exit
    if(handle != NULL)
        CloseHandle(handle);
    if(hFile != NULL)
        SFileCloseFile(hFile);
    if(hMpq != NULL)
        SFileCloseArchive(hMpq);

    return nError;
}

Copyright (c) Ladislav Zezula 2003 - 2010