Blizzard Entertainment:Storm
"Blizzard games released since 1996 to 2004 (Diablo, Diablo II, Starcraft, Warcraft II and Warcraft III) shipped with Storm.dll, a dynamic library that contained functions that were able to read data from the archives. This DLL also contained memory management functions, network support, compression functions and other. There was also a Mac version of this library, named Storm.bin. Storm.dll only contained functions for reading MPQs. The MPQ writing functions (saving games, creating maps etc.) were compiled inside the main game executable."
The Storm library is used extensively in World of Warcraft.
Features
- MPQ compression: one of Storm's main features was to provide asset compression/obfuscation using the MPQ format.
StormLib
Note: StormLib is a library for creating and reading from MPQ archives. Unlike not implement the whole set of features present in Storm.
To create a free and open source implementation of the MPQ capabilities of Storm, StormLib was created.
StormLib is very stable and has a good track record of being able to work with a wide range of MPQ archives, both old and new.
Thunderbrew currently utilizes StormLib to support directly loading assets from MPQ.
Reimplementations
Whoa and Thunderbrew attempt to recreate Storm as it existed in 2010 as free and open-source software.