Newbie Question Thread

[Tmills]

Hello everyone,

I'm currently using mini compressor tool to compress my games into SFX.exe files. I'm looking for an easy way to quickly identify a good compression method for my games. I'm not looking for maximum compression, just a good balance of compression and decompression/extraction speed that can handedly beat just using 7zip.

is there any kind of tool that can scan a game folder and give you a report of file types found?
is there a common method that will be good enough to just throw at most games?
mini compressor has presets for example:
mxc = xprecomp+lolz1/$bitmapz=bmpz/$bink=bink/$void=void/$photo=jpg/$ogg=ogg/$wavz=wvp/$mp3=mpz

any help would be appreciated. i just want a simple way to store my games and save storage space.

[dyren]

Originally Posted by Tmills

Hello everyone,

I'm currently using mini compressor tool to compress my games into SFX.exe files. I'm looking for an easy way to quickly identify a good compression method for my games. I'm not looking for maximum compression, just a good balance of compression and decompression/extraction speed that can handedly beat just using 7zip.

is there any kind of tool that can scan a game folder and give you a report of file types found?
is there a common method that will be good enough to just throw at most games?
mini compressor has presets for example:
mxc = xprecomp+lolz1/$bitmapz=bmpz/$bink=bink/$void=void/$photo=jpg/$ogg=ogg/$wavz=wvp/$mp3=mpz

any help would be appreciated. i just want a simple way to store my games and save storage space.

wiztree gives you each file types in great detail, i use it myself. there are also plenty of examples in these threads for methods:
https://fileforums.com/showthread.php?t=99554
https://fileforums.com/showthread.php?t=101639

its quite easy to learn the best methods for unity or unreal games, for example. i also suggest that you switch to DiskSpan GUI: https://fileforums.com/showthread.php?t=104507

i used both mini compressor and DiskSpan, and i can tell you that DiskSpan will be much better once you learn how to use it.

[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...