[3HattedDragon]

Originally posted by Andr&eacutes Lescano:
It can't be less messy than launching SE4 with the modlauncher program.
The only point of zipping them would be to save disk space.
Then the modlauncher would have to unzip the mod before playing, or worse the game itself would need to search files inside the zip adding an unnecessary delay.

I can imagine additional benefits to having mods in a zip file.

Instead of specifying a single directory in paths.txt, your could specify a comma-separated list of zip files that would all be loaded (combined) at runtime. If the same file exists in multiple mods, the one with higher priority would be picked (where priority is defined by the order of the list). This would allow the creation of 'base' mods (like image mods) to be easily used with other mods. Currently this requires manually copying files from one directory to another.

Of course, this really doesn't require zip files, the paths.txt file could just as easily have a comma-separated list of directories.