Woah!
joelpt, I've been away from DF for a while and I'm glad to see this updated.
I
really am.
However, this version is
huge! Uncompressed, it is nearly 21 MB (or 8.9 MB in a .ZIP). Compare that to Quickfort 2.0 at a mere 8.26 MB or even Quickfort v2.00pre3 at merely 6.84 MB (uncompressed). That's an increase of over 300% since 2.00pre3! This makes including Quickfort in DF mods like
Lazy Newb Pack problematic as most do not want a download that big. (It seems Lazy Newb Pack has regular and "advanced" packs now to save space.)
I suspect a significant part of this program bloat comes from trying to make it completely platform independent. You say it "works on Windows and Linux/OSX/(anything that runs Python)". But you also say:
AutoHotkey/Python need not be installed for Windows users. Non-Windows users need to have Python installed.
If you made a version of the 2.04 release that is
dependent on Python and/or AutoHotkey, it would probably require much less space. A lot of us Windows users already have Python installed, anyway, as a lot of other programs require it. (I also keep AutoHotkey installed. It's small and quite handy. And there are other useful DF macros and AutoHotkey scripts.)
Oh, and since the download includes the source code, that's another 732 KB that most Quickfort users don't need.
On modern computers, many DF fans might scoff at 21 MB. But some of us are on laptops with small drives crammed full and we realize ever bit adds up. For me, it's enough that I'd consider an old version, if it wasn't for the fact that I'd probably use some of the new features like designating mine tracks...
With that it mind, would you consider looking into the size issue for the next release? Maybe you could upload a "compact" python dependent version - without the source code - to
DFFD? (It's where a lot of DF fans search for new releases.) And also the source code as a separate download?
Edit:Hmm... I forgot that Quickfort was built in AutoHotkey. The source code is useful in that I could just install that instead of the "compiled version". AutoHotkey is about 7.6 MB and the Quickfort code is about 0.7 MB.
When I first tried to run
Quickfort.ahk it stopped with an error message. But then I updated AutoHotkey to the latest and it worked fine.
Then I tried compiling
Quickfort.ahk to an .exe. As long as I included the contents of the
config subdirectory, it works fine and it's only 860 KB
total.
And one does not even need AutoHotkey after compiling. This saves about 20 MB (a savings of over 2400%)! Even keeping the "blueprints" and Chromafort directories, that's still only about 1157 KB (saving about 2000%).
It runs, but I haven't tested it fully. The only downside I see is that it would be Windows-only. Is the AHK version missing some features? Perhaps it has less config options?
Edit of Edit:I found out about the free
MPRESS .exe compressor. Using that with AutoHotkey's Ahk2Exe tool compiled
Quickfort.ahk to a mere 319 KB (compared to the usual 711 KB) and it still works. Combining that with the
config subdirectory and the "blueprints" and Chromafort directories would be only about 765 KB in total!
Ah, but that still leaves the
qfconvert tool.
I did manage to use MPRESS to compress the .exe from 2959 KB to 2376 KB by using the "preserve EOF data" switch and it still works. (It won't run if the EOF data is not preserved.) But that's not much savings when one considers all the large .pyd and .dll file dependencies...