XTool 2020 (Main Project)

[elit]

-grittibanzli inflate completely randomly. Sometimes tested 20mb inflated zip file is 34mb, other times 31.6mb, another time 33mb atd. exactly same setting and just repeating same command on console.

-zlib codec did not inflated zip file at all!(I thought it was supposed to handle deflate?)

-preflate and reflate both did to same ~27mb, but preflate took ~6sec while reflate did it in ~1sec.

Looks like good old reflate is still the best zlib codec to stick.


EDIT(and ztool is also able to inflate to 27mb without :high or :m2 !) <<UPDATE(BS, scrap that claim, need m2 or high indeed)
EDIT2(ok I checked manual again and learned about zlib+reflate combination benefits. Maybe this is best way. It took ~3sec compared to ~1sec on deflate alone though. Not sure how big those benefits are in real application yet.)
EDIT3(have to explicitly state 'mb' in -c option instead of just 'm', e.g. -c128m vs -c128mb. No big deal but used to ztool, was more flexible. PS: I am really liking the idea of zlib+reflate in one go, before I used to pass twice in test to find out which one to use.)

[78372]

Originally Posted by elit

-zlib codec did not inflated zip file at all!(I thought it was supposed to handle deflate?)

Yes, zlib is supposed to handle deflate but here's the catch, most of the standard zip files does not use regular deflate levels. In order to precompress, the zlib codec tries standard deflate compression levels (9levels * 9 memlevels = 81 tries) and not the tuned deflate options. On the other hand, preflate and reflate does not go with the hit&trial method, it has it's own algo for processing deflate streams. Games in general does not use deflate tuning which is why the zlib codec works good for games, but in other cases like zip, preflate/reflate works better.

Using zlib on where it does not need preflate/reflate is better though, as zlib codec does not produce additional hif files which makes compression a bit worse. When you are not sure, zlib+reflate is good to go as zlib will precompress what it can and pass whatever it can't to reflate which will maximize precompression. Except a few complex deflate streams, zlib+preflate is also a good option as hif files produced by preflate are significantly smaller than the files produced by reflate.