Shrinking IBT files for distribution

potterr on 3/7/2006 at 17:58

Cheers, if you read this before yoru email, its sounds like a good solution to me. :thumb:

Shadowspawn on 5/7/2006 at 15:40

potterr,

Check your email again. I have the requested changes all set and emailed to you. If this works, we should be good to go.

potterr on 7/7/2006 at 23:02

Right, I have now got ShadowSpawns DLLs built into GL and ready to go. :thumb:

I have only tested the full process on 1 FM so far (Dark Arrows original creature clash T3 release), with a sucessful shrink of the zip from 14.2MB to 2.9MB (80% shrink).
Only one current drawback if you have changed any of these files
MainMenu_PHYALL.ibt
MainMenu_TSDALL.ibt
Kernel_PHYALL.ibt
Kernel_TSDALL.ibt
Kernel_GFXALL.ibt
MainMenu_GFXALL.ibt
they will not get compressed at the moment, although the green ones don't really need to, the red ones do.
SS has worked out a process for this, however I have yet to program it (it complicated as if you change the file then there is potentially nothing to compare it with on the users PC to rebuild it so I will have to do a bit of re-jigging of GLs code to get that to re-compile correctly).

With exception to the _GFXALL.IBT files and no updated help files, a beta of GL 1.41 is pretty much ready to go, all I need now is a few volunteers to test packaging and installing T3 FMs (preferably their own).

Let me know if you are interested and I will get an upgrade installer packaged up for you to try and some instructions.

NOTE: you will need to have really read the relevant parts of the (http://potterdevelopments.org.uk/fm/downloads.pl?downloadgroup=Tutorials) GarrettLoader For Authors Tutorial before hand to get a better idea of what happens (although its not quite complete yet).

A big thanks to ShadowSpawn for his work on this as well.

Bardic on 8/7/2006 at 23:33

Very cool, I think I'm ready to shrink Forgotten Stash. It will be interesting to see how much difference there is since I put almost all of John P's textures into my editor textures folder and I assume those portions of the IBT can't be stripped out. But then I don't know how many of his textures are used in the map either.

Shadowspawn on 9/7/2006 at 02:01

We need to add all of John P's textures to an IBT file someday and distribute that as a texture upgrade pack. It's a simple step to add that to the FM developer package, so it would automatically be included in the compression process.

Of course, then you couldn't play the FM unless you have the upgrade pack, but if it was that important to the mission...

potterr on 9/7/2006 at 02:02

That will be an interesting test, I'll PM you a link to the download later on.

242 on 12/7/2006 at 09:15

Quote Posted by potterr

Wow, that's great!
I think after testing the news should be posted also in the Fan Missions forum.

potterr on 12/7/2006 at 09:41

It will be about a week of testing and then if all is ok I will hopefully have a release by early august. However if there are authors that are nearly completed with their FMs now, let me know and I'll send you a beta to test with.

Bardic on 12/7/2006 at 18:00

Well, first off a quick note. When I installed the editor using Komag's tutorial, I removed the OM ibt files from my editor folder because they weren't needed and it saved 800MB of space. So the shrinker didn't work until I put those back in there.

Once I did that it has worked very well. My main ibt is 65MB normally, 43MB when compressed, and 25MB when shrunk and compressed, and that is with however many of John P's textures I used.

One more thing, if you are making your mission and you choose not to shrink the ibt it doesn't include the unshrunk ibt into the zip, just tthe readme file in the ones I tried.

Shadowspawn on 12/7/2006 at 21:06

potterr,

Can we shrink the IBT file in the playing directory, not the editing directory? That would save having to re-install the IBT files to compress it.