My first attempts at game-modding in general and Modding of Wing Commander Saga in particular, I did in 2012. At that time I had to do for the first time with VP archives and sat mainly VPVIEW. At the end of 2013, when our own project Wing Commander Saga German was started, a script-capable tool was needed to create VP archives. The only suitable tool that was available for Windows back then was VPMAKE, which we then used throughout the development and beta test. All other tools were useless for our project because they were not scriptable and also had some serious bugs.
Also after the release (end of 2015) the tool VPMAKE was used for all updates of WCSD (up to and including Service Pack 1, end of 2016). However, VPMAKE can only generate VPs but not unpack. So in 2014 I developed my own VP function library (VPU UDF) for List and Extract for the programming language AutoIt3. This library was then used by several - mostly internal - tools, including "WCS Base Auto Extract (https://forum.wcsaga.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=142)" and "VPU" (never published), a script-capable tool for listing and unpacking VP archives. We also integrated VPU into TC by means of MA. So you could open VP's in the TC, list and unpack. {Note: TC is the default file manager of our team's two programmers.} Already at that time (2014), VPU mastered unpacking with a file list as a parameter, file list from a file, file patterns, and RegEx. With the combination of VPMAKE and VPU I had all the essential functions to be able to handle script-controlled with VP archives. However, the functionality of VPMAKE was too limited for me and I wanted to combine all the functions in just one tool. So at the end of 2016 I started to expand the function library and VPU so that VP's could be created, like with VPMAKE. However, with the advantages of VPU (file pattern and RegEx). The tool was renamed to "VPT" and the function library (UDF) to "VPPU". At the beginning of 2017, the Add and Delete functions were also added to allow the subsequent addition and deletion of files.
Thus, VPT now offers (2017) more than the combination VPMAKE and VPU. VPT has become a universal VP Tool and will replace VPMAKE in our production system.