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

[:( Sad8669]

Forza Horizon 5 - Precompression

Overall input size: 92.32 GB
Overall output size: 150.84 GB

Compressed 11,938 files, 99,133,025,380 => 161,958,571,033 bytes. Ratio 163.37%
Compression time: cpu 190.63 sec/real 7941.73 sec = 2%. Speed 12.48 mB/s
All OK

[:( Sad8669]

Method : srep:m3f:l512+lzma:a1:mfbt4:256m:fb273:mc1000000000:lc8
Compression Time : 6 Hours 39 Minutes and 47 seconds
Decompression Time : 52 Minutes (4T)
Initial Size : 41.02 GB
Final Size: 30.24 GB

[:( Sad8669]

Well, if anyone is interested in hearing/extracting GOW sounds, you can do the following.

They are found here, GodOfWar\exec\wad\pc_le\soundbanks with extension .sdp

Open any of the file with HxD, select everything and scroll down until you see BKHD. Delete all hex code to the point you see "BKHD", also delete the highlighted area.

Now, you have a bank file. Which can be extracted using armyoftwo.bms (QuickBMS).

OR

You can use bnkextr, its faster.

https://github.com/eXpl0it3r/bnkextr
After extracting the bank, you will find alot of .wem files named as .wav

Convert them to OGG, if you want to hear them.

[KaktoR]

Thanks for the hint.

You can repack extracted files with plain zip (0 compression, just storing) and create a diff file to patch back to original. Now find a way to do the hex editing for hundreds of files in a batch

[:( Sad8669]

Creating diff was also in my mind, but there is no bnk repacker so you can't hope to use WemTool on the inside .wem files, since there would be no way to rebuild them.

If there was a bnkrepacker, we might have saved 150~200 MB (only 1~2 MB compression with WemTool on 80 MB files)

BKHD header occurs at different places in different files, i think there is no pattern + we can ignore some 1 KB ~ 1 MB files

[Masquerade]

Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem

Start Size: 25.5GB

Method:

xtool+msc+srep+lolz

Final Size: 17.3GB

Notes:

*.gro archives are Zip files.

[dixen]

Originally Posted by Masquerade

Final Size: [Compressing...]

~ 18 gb.
XTool v0.40 + Reflate = All *.gro - 28 gb > 50 gb..but..error unpack from lolz (it just closed on 6.4%)
UPD
XTool + zlib+preflate

Tested 1 file, 18,629,519,581 => 26,137,702,000 bytes. Ratio 71.27%
Testing time: cpu 28.02 sec/real 500.07 sec = 6%. Speed 52.27 mB/s
All OK

[:( Sad8669]

Method : srep:m3f:l512+lzma:a1:mfbt4:256m:fb273:mc1000000000:lc8
Compression Time : 8.4 Hours
Decompression Time : 55+ Minutes (4T)
Initial Size : 61 GB
Final Size: 27.9 GB
Ripped : All Lang files except ENG
Possibilities : You can use BPK on bink files.

[Masquerade]

srep+lolz

12.6GB ---> 2.7GB

[KaktoR]

Originally Posted by Masquerade

Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem

Start Size: 25.5GB

Method:

xtool+msc+srep+lolz

Final Size: 17.3GB

Notes:

*.gro archives are Zip files.

There are some ogg's too

[Masquerade]

I saw those. I think may be a good idea to have another go and use QuickBMS to import the oggs back to their correct spot in the archive. Using oggre in the pipeline would probably cause issues.

[KaktoR]

I guess you can just make a xtool database for this.

[Masquerade]

There's only about 350mb of OGG audio in the game.

[Masquerade]

Neon Abyss

Step 1: 7x bundle files (ignoring StandaloneWindows64) - Use UBT to decompress them, then recompress each bundle and make a patch for each. I ended up with ~16mb of HDiffZ patches in total. When decompressed, the game requires 2.3GB of disk space despite only being 1GB when compressed.

Step 2: Compress:

srep+lolz/$mp4=srep+zstd/$bank=srep+razor/$hdiffz=srep

Final Size: 250MB

[Masquerade]

Rugby 22

srep+lolz/$wav=msc+srep+lzma2/$mp4=srep+zstd

23.5GB ----> 3.7GB

I experienced issues with srep v3.92b with this game so I used srep v3.2 instead.