XTool 2020 (Main Project)

[elit]

@Razor now I understand, thank you! Its clear that internal knowledge of xtool is still important. All make sense now although it also means my "lz scan" cannot be a simple fire & forget proof for all corner cases(well it could but I feel it would be too much to go with each level separately within the script + all the lib versions etc., maybe compiled binary with proper output report would do). It is fine though, as long as users are aware of this.

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Unrelated to above, I want to give one advice to all users regarding zstd(possibly lz4 as well). For best results it may be important to try all lib versions even if you found one working. During my switch games repacking I found for example that nearby versions and sometimes far versions may get better result(or pickup again) and by results not only I mean size but also speed. ZSTD have a habit to slow down to crawl(~1mb/s) when used on wrong lib version or can have as much as 2-3x speed difference on nearby versions where all of them can inflate very close to!

I dont have data to show you anymore, but just to imagine it was something like this. Lets say we have a random file of 8Mb, then:

libzstd130.dll > 10000k > 6min
libzstd131.dll > 13000k > 5min
libzstd132.dll > 16000k > 3min
libzstd133.dll > 16400k > 1min
libzstd134.dll > 16500k > 20s
libzstd135.dll > 16550k > 15s
libzstd136.dll > 8000k > 4min (back to original size)
...                           (here all following versions did nothing)
libzstd144.dll > 16200k > 1min
libzstd145.dll > 16620k > 13s
libzstd146.dll > 8700k > 4min

This is just example, not exact but yes something like that actually happened.