OK I am being cheeky, but I'm caught up in the fact that many new plugins are being added lately! I will add a suggestion, but I guess the excitement got to me and wanted to spark the idea/discussion.
Would a ZIP plugin be on the cards for Scirra to produce?
I suppose the concerns I can think of is if people tried loading a huge 100GB zip file, or extracting 100's of GBs. Perhaps filesize could be limited or checkable, and well, we can already write via NWJS without any limitation.
There's 2 uses for ZIP that come to mind: creating a mod pack, and installing mods.
E.G. I have a image generator in my project to allow custom images to be produced, which creates about 30 images, and are separated into a couple of folders. I currently use NWJS plugin to create folders and write the images to the local computer. I also have a custom level maker that creates a JSON file with all level data, along with extra files that the player might have added along with their custom level.
Having ZIP functionality would allow a handful of files to be zipped up without requiring NWJS (as you could create files and folders in the ZIP and then invoke download of the ZIP), and would also allow people to use "file chooser" to load in a ZIP file, and then we could get a specific file from the zip to read, or unzip all contents to a directory (if on NWJS), allowing you to have mod support fully built in to your game, no expectation of users needing to find the correct path to extract the zip manually.
Beyond this, a Construct user that has the technical knowledge could possibly change ".zip" into something else like ".mymod" and then possibly create support (at least in windows) to have file associations with this filetype, which could then allow us to create a system where the user downloads a file, double clicks it, and then your game will launch or detect this with parameters and such, and begin unzipping. That'd be so awesome!
A third party plugin exists and I did start adding this into my project, but abaonded it due to 2 issues, which was the fact it froze your game if worker mode was enabled, and, it locked up the whole game whilst performing zip actions (I wonder if ZIP actions could run asynchronously, or even limit the speed of unzipping to not cause CPU to peak to 99%).
Thank you for your time!!