Fantastic job, Stefan! Your hard work is much appreciated. Again - Great job!

It is just better, more options, more compression. I thought it is stadard by now. Just download winrar and you dont have to worry about compression file types most of the time.

I don't like WinRAR or any of those compression tools, and I don't want any of them on my computer, thank you.

It really irritates me when something this useful comes out, something I'd like to use, and it's in an *.rar archive.  Please, give us a *.zip option.

By the way, that tech tree viewer will be amazing.  I sure get tired of opening up GalCiv2 just to look at my tech tree.

What if you're on Win98?

Zip required a separate program once upon a time.

In any case: While the .rar is 27.5MB, the .zip is 28.7MB.

[Link removed]

I don't think there is yet a "stadard" for this type of thing. Winzip was the first out of the gate, but there isn't yet a clear winner in the compression wars.

I have to agree with you here. It is by any measurable standard superior to winzip. 

Winrar is not shareware. Every time I launch the program it reminds me of such, but it still works. Winzip started out as shareware, if you will remember; then it became begware, then it became demandware, and now it is bloatware.

Winrar has been around for years. It works, plain and simple. Click on the file to dowload it, double-click to decompress, and there you go- every time.

In any case I have no issue installing apps, shareware or otherwise, that I really *need*, it's just that this is the first time that I've had a need for something in *.rar format and thanks to SoleSoul I still don't *need* it.

If you really hate sharewares, use 7zip. It unpacks .rar files (but does NOT pack them) and is as easy to use as Winrar.
Distributed under LGPL licence (plus a specific one for the rar decompression)

thanks Stefen and I-Mod team

I still don't understand what's so complicated with optionnaly uninstalling winzip and installing winrar or 7-zip in its place...

I guess to each his own...

if you often begin to download a lot of mods here and there for games, you will often stumble upon rar files

rar saves space and so user bandwith and more importantly server bandwith which might not be important for you but is important for a lot of webmasters hosting free sites which pay for the bandwith ...

7-zip can have an even better compression ratio but is quite heavy on the decompression time department and is less frequent than rar files (which themselves are less frequent than zip files)

EDIT: I'll add that while winrar is shareware it lets you use it for an unlimited amount of time unregistered, 7-zip is free and more importantly both tools read zip, rar and 7-zip while winzip only reads zip of the three

And I wanted to do a separate post as a request for the I-mod team :

-if you guys could integrate additional visual options to be shown on the trees it would be nice, like for example : an icon for unstealable/untradable, an icon for unique tech (not present in any other tree)...

I'm throwing the idea into the air, if you guys like it, take it. If it's not possible to do it, drop it...

Thanks for reading.

Basically there are two kinds of people (actually there's way more than that but for the purposes of this example let's just assume the two extremes). One person doesn't particularly care what is installed on his computer and installs pretty much anything that crosses his path whether he really needs it or not. Generally this kind of person soon ends up having no real clue as to what is on his computer, why he needs it, or even knows how to use half of the stuff that he has. This kind of person usually ends up with a screen full of icons of which only a small percentage is ever used and a task manager full of processes about which he knows absolutely nothing.

The other extreme is someone like me that will only install something if they have a demonstrated need and even then checks what services are installed and what process need to be automatically started and will then make a decision on whether the overhead of the app is worth having it on their system. Also the realization that apps are not particularly careful about all the crap that they leave behind when uninstalled makes even installing something "just to see how it works" somewhat problematic. That's why I take a disk image of my boot drive before installing *anything* and if I don't like the result then I simply restore the boot image as if the install never happened. There is no backup, restore point or uninstall that can make the same guarantee.

For example I have yet to be convinced that it's worth it to me to install Impulse on my system. I can't really justify the installation of a download support system just to keep one program up to date even though I do care very much about that one program and even though as far as software companies go I would trust Stardock and otherwise believe that Impulse is as non intrusive as possible.

Anyway I know more people are like the 1st example than the second and that's fine with me but I at least *know* why I have everything that is on my system and how to use it and am in control of what processes I allow to automatically run.

However none of this says that 7-zip or even winrar is inherently bad it's just that I have yet to encounter a demonstrated *need* to have it on my machine and until I do have such a demonstrated need I won't install such software. Who knows, by the time I really need such software we'll be another 2 operating systems down the line and it will be integrated into the OS (not that that's any guarantee that it will be good).

Because on XP or higher, WinZip isn't even installed in the first place; Windows makes uses of Zip "folders".

There are 10 kinds of people.  Those who understand binary, and those who don't. 

For folks who only occasionally or rarely have need of an compression/decompression program and are particular about what gets installed on their computer, I heartily recommend the portabilized version of Z-Zip, which is available either alone or can be rolled into a larger suite of tools from PortableApps.com.

All programs distributed from PortableApps are:

-Free.  They cost nothing, don't give you pop-up reminders, aren't gimped (well, except for PortableGIMP, which is GIMPed, but in a good way).

-Opensource.  All programs distributed from PortableApps can be modified and redistributed, and the source code is auditable.  

-Portablized, which means no permanent registry changes.  You can run them from portable media like a cd or a flash drive.  You don't have to install them to run them, and you don't have to uninstall them to get rid of them.  Just delete them when finished.  Keep the suite on a spare flash drive and only plug it on on those .rar occasions when you need to use one of the programs in it.

Thanks to the I-Mod team for these handy posters, and the apparently even-more handy poster creator forthcoming.  Merry Korxmas!

<edit> messy links, I'm used to using other forum markup language

I never ever saw a more crappy way to handle zip files than winXP own zip engine ... (only my opinion though)

you took the two extremes such that, of the two options, 1 represent 99% lol 

I'm not as extreme as you when it comes to uninstalling and such, I consider I know enough of comps to handle problematics uninstalls myself most of the time. In any case winrar or 7-zip don't fall in any category that runs background processes, the only thing you could hold against is their integration into the windows right clic menu BUT it's not even forced on the user and having the ability to right clic and uncompress is a nice convenience...

Anyway, I guess you'll rethink about it when you stumble upon the one rar file that you absolutely need