Current compressing techniques guidance

[joekkerr]

Holy shit, thank you so so so so much man! you were so informative.

Now tell me, do you know how to configure freearc to use external compressors

I cant understand the meaning of this.
Is it the case now that freearc can now run as an 'batch file' and process all the commands for external compressors in itself ?

Most of the games these days use to compress their games before publishing. Generally we know that a game contains audio, texture, video and etc. But we don't see well known files of these types in every games. That is because they make a compressed archive with all the files required for the game. A file that is compressed can't be compressed again. But if we unpack game files and recompress them again, in most of the cases we lost CRC and in some cases the game refuses to run. So to keep the files CRC-Perfect and achieve better compression, we need to precompress them. Precompressors decompresses contents of the game and restores them with perfect condition and 100% CRC match.

Holy shit i remember back when crysis was released it had packed files which can be easily recreated with winzip or rar, and i made each one separate during unpacking. basically ship it packed, then while unpacking used rar comand line to pack it again, each one of it LOL.

Now games uses other methods too, they are not using zlib only, so you can't only be happy with pzlib/reflate/precomp. Like Far Cry series uses lzo and lz4, Assassin's Creed series uses lzo and oodle, Need for Speed uses lz4 and oodle, mass effect Andromeda used zstd, unreal engine games use lzo and unity uses lz4 etc. To precompress them, we need to use various precompressors according to game, not a single universal one.

You mentioned these methods, by how do you identify which game has which.