Newbie Question Thread

[felixible11]

Friends. I have a great interest in repacking and am always fascinated by how blatantly you can compress some games. I can program, but here in the forum you are really overwhelmed with tools and programs.

Theoretically it works like this:

1) Precomp the data with xtool (there are already so many plugins here...)
a. Here it already fails. If I want to read in an entire folder, I always get 0 / 0 streams and the precomp file is exactly the same size as the source (that shouldn't be the case?)

%INPUT% = Sourcedir
xtool.exe precomp -mzlib+reflate -d3 -c64mb -t16 "%INPUT%"

b. In addition, there are countless possibilities and every game reacts differently to the combination of precomp algorithms. Can't I read in a game folder and it automatically returns the best combination? Somehow I'm at a loss here.

c. The precomp files must then be compressed (ideally with FreeArc?).
- If I try

arc.exe a -ep1 -dses --dirs -s; -lc- -di -i2 -r -w.\temp -mxtool:c32mb:mzlib data.arc “pack\*”

the data.arc is 1.5x too large as the source file?

I would love your help - somehow I'm at a loss.

Many thanks!

I will take care of the unpacking/installing afterwards. That should be easier...