KaOs Krew compressing method

[PanosBabo]

I’m a fan of KaOs Krew and I really like their compression methods. I’ve been studying a lot of their rips/repacks, so I’d like to explain to people who ask about it.

KaOs Krew method is a bit complicated and thanks to that, it has been more efficient by making individual compressions on textures, audio, as well as video recoding..
Kaos used to compress with
Freearc (-m0 -dm0) + Precomp + Srep + Freearc (Lzma)
But lately they’ve been using Freearc as a single internal compression for instance:
arc -mprecomp+srep+lzma:a1:mfbt4:d256m:fb128:mc1000:lc8
or arc -msrep+lzma:a1:mfbt4:d256m:fb128:mc1000:lc8
(Depends on game data structure)

So KaOs Krew has been making individual compressions on textures, audio and video recoding in order to achieve an installation game folder with much less size before the final (arc) compression.

For VIDEO compression they’ve been using “Bink video compressor” for .bik videos aka The RAD Video Tools which is a useful tool for video compressing in most games. KaOs usually makes compressions up to 50% (/D50) without wasting any conceivable quality. As for .wmv very often at 45%, as it still remains in pretty good video quality, there are many converters-recoders out there such as “WinAvi” and more.
I’ve no idea about other rare types like .ogv, .webm etc.

As for AUDIO compression, KaOs used to compress raw audio wave files (.wav) by using “Oggenc” or decompress .ogg to .wav by using “Oggdec”. But lately they’ve settled down on NeroAACEncoder which is a great tool for almost lossless audio recoding. They’ve got a tricky combination on using “oggdec” in order to decode .ogg from installed game directory folder to .wav and then using “neroaacenc” to recode them into .mp4 (aac-m4a family) , which is way too small size than .ogg regularly is. On that way it is possible to compress even ogg files, retaining their original quality.
KaOs Krew has renamed .mp4 output as .kaos, also changed the tool name into “Dec2” as well as for “Oggenc” into “KaOsO2”. Mostly they recode mp4 files about at -q0.2 / -q0.25 (quality).

TEXTURE Rebuild and compression is been achieved by using a significant tool named “Crunch” Advanced DXT texture compression by Rich Geldreich. It’s a program based on C++ code very useful for compressing raw texture image files (.dds, .png, .tga, .bmp) default compressed output file is .crn (crunch). This gives you the opportunity to get a 50-60% compression out of it. You must be careful with .dds texture files, cause they're really sensitive and rarely may be damaged after decompression.
Kaos has renamed it as “KaOsTex” and modified the default output from .crn to .kas instead.
Conclusion: A great tool to get rid of a huge size portion on raw images.

Other KaOs tools are “KaOs-MP32” for mp3 recoding, “KaOsDupe” I assume is for searching duplicated files or somethin’ like that. There is “KaOsDI” (Data Injector) which I suspect it has to do with unpackers in relation to pklite32 (PkWare) like "unpakke" for .spr package files and other container formats including several modules. Of course I don’t have to mention “KaOs”, ”KaOscmp” and “KaOsrep”. We all know what they really are.

You may notice that in most games, the user had to go to installation folder and create a game shortcut. I’m glad that KaOs Krew started using the .vbs file script I gave them about a month ago for automated shortcut to desktop.

[pakrat2k2]

handy information for those who want to try & pack more into an installation.

[MartinezPL]

Maybe someone from here gonna makes conversion like KaOs ?
Textures,audio gonna be rebulid after installation like kaos is doing

[Razor12911]

great research man, I might add these functions to the converter.

[Alash Als]

Originally Posted by pakrat2k2

handy information for those who want to try & pack more into an installation.

can yoh give me the kaos krew system by panos babo

[kj911]

My preferred and best ripper KPS! (KaPiTaLSiN)

KPS few years ago released and freely shared few game ripping, duplicated file searching tools. These tools name GRS and Duper console programs.

THE DUPER v 1.4.01
===================
This app it's used to compare files and the result it's a 2 .bat files
-Dupe.bat y remove.bat

How to use:
-------------
Unpack this zip in a folder and copy the 3 .exe where you want analiyze the files, and execute dcmp.exe and wait, when the program finish you found 2 .bat files

If you Execute remove.bat, in this case you delete the duped files
When you removed the duped files in the installation program make a "call" to the file dupe.bat and you recover the files

Don't forgett to delete the files list_tmp.txt ref_tmp.txt, both are a temps from the analisys

This program it's under license FREEWARE. DON'T PAY FOR THAT
AT NO MOMENT ONE TAKES RESPONSIBILITY OF ANY DAMAGE TO YOUR COMPUTER, OR HARDWARE OR SOFTWARE, LIKE ANY LOST ONE OF DATA

Not tested these tools in few times.

Attached the post.

UPDATE: The tools tested from previous day, its big modded MSTS game files. (~160k file). Two *.BAT file generated by 2+ hours time. Tested the "remove_dupe.bat" and "dupe.bat" files. Removed, duped files, not fully perfect via Win10, its probably os error or any's. Game files contain, special localized characters. (ÍÁÉÚÜŰŐÖÓ) Partially removed, few files and reduced game size higher than 5GBs. ReDuped the games and compared the file counts, its missing 4 files, before removing duped ones.

Generated Two *.BAT files uploaded to: https://ulozto.net/file/KgkmhKLxaquf...-bat-files-rar