gnartsch on 24/8/2012 at 15:52
Quote Posted by snobel
Do you know where to find that? Is it a recent update?
(
http://thiefmissions.com/m/Bridge) The Bridge, v1.5 (Nov. 8, 2006)
snobel on 25/8/2012 at 08:06
Thanks. Turns out I had it already - I didn't remember any published mission having more than one cbt.
gnartsch on 25/8/2012 at 08:30
Quote Posted by snobel
* Apart from that one FM which has a corrupted .cbt file, has there been any problems with it, or has it gone out of fashion because the size of large missions is dominated by custom textures and movie files? It seems like a fast and easy way to get the file size down, at least for some FMs - "Thief's Rising" shrinks from 326 MB to 91 - or 57 with a little improvement of the scheme.
Adsk1 is currently working on a revised version of "Thief's Rising".
If you could explain to him what needs to be done, then the update would be much smaller.
It is just right now (as I am working on the german translation for it) that I notized it being shipped with .ibt files.
snobel on 25/8/2012 at 09:08
Good idea, but I've no experience with the compression/optimizing side of things as they currently are - using GL etc. I've only used my own implementation for that. But I'll PM him the numbers, and if he's interested maybe one of the mappers can explain, or I can have a look at it.
Now that I'm revisiting the cbt stuff I'm considering making a small ibt/cbt utility - most of the code is already there - so maybe that can be an option too.
Beleg Cúthalion on 25/8/2012 at 12:55
If multiple missions contain the same textures, shouldn't zipping (or 7z..ing) up shrink them then, as you said in the cbt example?
snobel on 26/8/2012 at 09:35
Not with zip, because it compresses every file individually. 7zip will do much better.
I just did a couple of experiments to see how well modern compression programs can compress the non-cbt version of "Thief's Rising". For 7zip at its best the resulting archive was 196 MB, still more than double the cbt/zip version. And if you combine (improved) cbt and 7zip the archive is a little over 34 MB...
For fun I also tried freearc (supported only by ModernLoader?). That format is a bit exotic, but it is very impressive: 103 MB for the ibt version, quite close to the cbt/zip version. The cbt/freearc archive came out at 33 MB.
Overall, for this mission at least, cbt/zip or cbt/7zip seems to be the best choice, depending on whether you want to keep compatibility with GarretLoader. (GL doesn't support 7zip, right?)
snobel on 29/9/2012 at 11:13
The first two posts have been updated, based on the feedback. Also, a small status report may be in order:
Most of the loader functionality is in place. I have been struggling with the unzipping part (7z.dll being a bit of a pain), but since someone just dumped a perfectly good FM frontend (with source code!) on us, I'm just going to assume that it can be whipped into shape for T3. So the next step will be to rip out my own unzipping and dialog code. It will still be possible to play FMs without a frontend, but it's going to take a bit more work than originally intended.
After that, I'll add the property storage fixes together with some logging, so that we can find out how effective those fixes are. Then I'll try pushing an alpha release to the usual suspects 'round here, because some outside feedback would be good at this point.
