Anonymous
7/22/2025, 1:45:36 AM No.105983027
I managed to compress warband (native only) to just over 200mb. The game is originally about 2gb, the latest version 1.173.
And it was only 200mb because I didn't want to be more aggressive with the compression, I wanted to keep the quality minimally pleasant
There were one or two textures with alpha that I converted to DXT2 (binary alpha). Also: UI textures I reduced in size by 2x, other textures I reduced by 4x. Audio by default is vorbis 256kb, I reduced it to 32kb. I also had to remove support for Chinese, Japanese, etc.
While I was doing this, I remembered that 20 years ago, back in the days of slow internet and windows xp, I used to download rip versions of games, which used bat to decompress the texture and audio files to a format that the game supported. If I did that, I might be able to reduce the size of the game even more and even increase the quality, because I think something like opus could have the same quality with half the bitrate of a vorbis?
This kind of thing doesn't seem to exist anymore, now what we see in things like fitgirl is simply using extremely inefficient compressors, like paq8, which takes almost a day to decompress 30gb.
Well, I actually created this thread to share this experience: RIP games. Fitgirl uses compression without loss of quality. Why aren't there more rip games, games that are truly compressed with no loss of quality?
Current games already have a lot of support for modern formats, eliminating the need to “extract to the correct format”, as I did with Warband. Why aren't people interested in this? It would be very interesting to see bg3 in 10gb, without the need to install it, just extract it.
And it was only 200mb because I didn't want to be more aggressive with the compression, I wanted to keep the quality minimally pleasant
There were one or two textures with alpha that I converted to DXT2 (binary alpha). Also: UI textures I reduced in size by 2x, other textures I reduced by 4x. Audio by default is vorbis 256kb, I reduced it to 32kb. I also had to remove support for Chinese, Japanese, etc.
While I was doing this, I remembered that 20 years ago, back in the days of slow internet and windows xp, I used to download rip versions of games, which used bat to decompress the texture and audio files to a format that the game supported. If I did that, I might be able to reduce the size of the game even more and even increase the quality, because I think something like opus could have the same quality with half the bitrate of a vorbis?
This kind of thing doesn't seem to exist anymore, now what we see in things like fitgirl is simply using extremely inefficient compressors, like paq8, which takes almost a day to decompress 30gb.
Well, I actually created this thread to share this experience: RIP games. Fitgirl uses compression without loss of quality. Why aren't there more rip games, games that are truly compressed with no loss of quality?
Current games already have a lot of support for modern formats, eliminating the need to “extract to the correct format”, as I did with Warband. Why aren't people interested in this? It would be very interesting to see bg3 in 10gb, without the need to install it, just extract it.
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