Best Compression Methods for 'Specific' Games. Q&A

[KaktoR]

Originally Posted by dixen

Which version and settings for srep are you using for Cities Skylines 2? On second pass levelerror=XXXXXXXXX. Srep version and his settings doesn't matter. ZSTDRec or XTool - too.

While the old initial game version worked just fine, I got problems with the new game version 1.1.0.F1.

Then I thought maybe new xtool version was the problem (do not wanted to blame Razor for that lol) so then I tested all xtool versions back to 0.7.9, same error. But then I remembered a problem a while ago about this game with some srep errors, so then I tested just precompressing and srep afterwards. While xtool did not gave me any error messages about srep, I tested srep instead of xtool dedup with srep.exe and this error appears:

Compressing 176,993,820,246 bytes with "srep.exe" -hash- -m3f InFile OutFile
Errorlevel=-1073741819
100.0%
ERROR: general (de)compression error in srep

If using xtool's dd feature using srep.exe, I got no error message at all but compressed data was corrupted like this:

60 GB input  -> 7 GB output, Ratio 11.67%

I even tested all different srep versions I have but all the same. Then I remembered another game where srep had big problems aswell. So after testing a bit again further with the new game version, I found out you have just to use FA's internally old rep before using srep, which will look something like this then:

xtool:zstd+rep+srep+...

Log

Initial version (xtool:zstd:dd3+4x4:lzma)
Overall input size: 55,63 GB
Overall output size: 34,48 GB (Ratio 61.97%)

Version 1.1.0.F1 (xtool:zstd+rep+srep+4x4:lzma)
Overall input size: 59.34 GB
Overall output size: 36.59 GB (Ratio 61.66%)

Extraction time about 20 minutes.

I hope this helps.