Hello I am looking to implement a package system for a game engine. Basically, a package is an archive that can store multiple files and data in just one file. This is to make the data distribution a bit easier and to tidy up the folders a bit. I was going to code my own file format, but I realized I can just ask to see whether there are already any existing libraries out there that I can use instead. It should be easy to extract individual files from a package plus I think some sort of compression would be nice too. Any hints? I was looking at how Unreal engine does it.

PhysicsFS is a C library that supports a number of archive formats. I, personally, use Zip files for data archives, and PhysicsFS can handle them perfectly. It's also pretty simple to use.

Hope that helps!

EDIT: Cleanup.

Yes, I was actually considering the 7zip file format. Zlib offers no internal data structure and is merely a compression library. Zip was as a thought too, but I would prefer 7z over it. PhysicsFS looks interesting, but I am not sure whether I actually need support for that many file types.

I'll try out 7z for now. They have a nice SDK available.