Day Twenty One: Wait, what?

19 comment(s)

Posted by Nicolas (permalink)

Three days ago, I was whining because the game files had grown from 750 MB to 1 GB, and people advised us to use the LZMA (7zip) compression instead of the default ZIP compression. I initially thought it was a bad idea because I also thought the LZMA compression format was specifically linked to 7zip. But I was wrong, and I managed to build an installer with LZMA compression. And believe me or not but... the installer is back to 790 MB.

It means the game was compressed at a ratio of 52%, I never thought LZMA could be this powerful. Anyway, this is done. The last tests are complete, the game is ready to ship.

PS: Look at what people expect the most from the countdown timer website. Glad to see people expect Portal: Prelude more than the end of the world =D

1. Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince Movie
2. Portal: Prelude
3. The end of time
4. Grand Theft Auto IV
5. Grand Theft Auto IV for PC

19 comment(s)

Comments

  October 5, 2008 11:43 PM,  FreakCERS said :
What other methods did you try? (or is it a cumbersome task to perform the change?) - if you feel like experimenting, I'd suggest trying bz2 - it's usually far better than zip (though, also a bit slower)

  October 5, 2008 11:50 PM,  uNCLEsAM098 said :
Then ship already! :P

Just kidding, but glad you found something that works.

5 days and counting!

  October 6, 2008 12:11 AM,  Nicolas said :
@FreakCERS:
http://flashlight.slad.cz/files/compression.pdf

  October 6, 2008 12:36 AM,  Valentin said :
Cool Cat Pic ^^
but nice to see things going on

  October 6, 2008 1:43 AM,  Jason said :
YAY! One less person off of the evil zip drug. Joking aside, great job on getting this done. I am happy to hear LMZA helped a lot.

  October 6, 2008 2:02 AM,  The_Lost_World said :
I really can't wait! ^_^

  October 6, 2008 2:37 AM,  Sarda [CP] said :
have you uncompressed the files and played them from that also? because that would be something to check just to make sure it's staying the same, with that kind of compression rate

  October 6, 2008 9:20 AM,  Nicolas said :
@Sarda [CP]:
Yes, I checked if the installation was OK, if the game was still OK, if the size was still the same and if it was still running. And it's the case.

  October 6, 2008 9:57 AM,  Filip said :
I believe Nicolas is referring to countdown2zero.com (the rankings match). Here is the link to Portal: Prelude specifically:

http://www.countdown2zero.com/d0490

Come on folks, the HP movie is just barely edging us out, we can beat it! (My disdain for HP is irrelevant, ahem.) Just load up the countdown and obsess with everyone else!

  October 6, 2008 10:14 AM,  13xforever said :
Oh, I never thought that people still using ZIP if they have another choices. Nowadays almost every general-use compression algorithm outperforms ZIP in terms of compression ratio.

Too bad, that no one installer (of what I know), did not allow of using more than 64 MB dictionary. Using 256 MB can give up to 15% additional compression boost. (The more, the better, but even 256 MB dictionary requires about 3.5 GB of RAM).

  October 6, 2008 1:32 PM,  ororuK said :
expect*

  October 6, 2008 3:11 PM,  HikariMisako said :
Are we going to need 7zip to unpack this?

  October 6, 2008 3:41 PM,  Cheesey said :
No, also WinRAR can unpack 7zip. Here you'll find an overview:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_archivers

  October 6, 2008 5:20 PM,  Nicolas said :
You won't need 7zip, and you won't need WinRAR or any archiver. The only thing you'll need is Windows 2000/XP/Vista and Steam.

  October 6, 2008 5:27 PM,  Nicolas said :
(and Portal of course)

  October 6, 2008 5:54 PM,  Anonymous said :
YES!Only 3 days to go!

  October 6, 2008 7:33 PM,  Anonymous said :
I used to be a ZIP-oholic until I tried 7zip (free and open source) and used the 7z compression. My 20 MB of XLS files (work related), which compressed to 3.5 MB with the best of WinZIP compression, compressed to 200 KB with 7z!

I was worried about data loss, so I moved the file to another machine and decompressed ... BAM ... it was all good.

Plus, like WinRAR, I could have more than one 7zip window open and actively (de)compressing at the same time. Something explicitly not allowed with WinZIP.

2C

  October 6, 2008 11:55 PM,  ED said :
The countdown just passed 3 days 4 hours!

remember, it will also be Talk Like A Turret Day!

  October 7, 2008 10:16 PM,  Cheesey said :
@nicolas
we will need Portal? I thought it would run with the Source SDK Base only too?!
(I don't care, I have portal, just to get the infos right ;) )

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