Precomp and srep

[vlv]

Hi everyone

I tried to pack some of my games. I used free arc but here I read about precomp and srep. I downloaded those two, but they don't work for me at all!
Can you tell me how to use them, give some tutorial that will explain step by step what to do in order to achieve the best compression.

For example, I got the game xxx and it has, let's say, 6gb. After packing with free arc (with the best compression) the game has 5gb. But I know it is possible to pack it more because I've seen the same game packed to 3gb. I think this is due to precomp and srep but when I pack this 5gb.arc arhive whith precomp or srep it doesn't change anything. The size of the game is sometimes even bigger or stay more or less the same.

And also in most games movies are i .bik file. Is there any way to pack such files, 'cause they seem to be unpackable.

[Skymmer]

I tried to pack some of my games. I used free arc but here I read about precomp and srep. I downloaded those two, but they don't work for me at all!

What do you mean? How they don't work? You got a crash or something?

For example, I got the game xxx and it has, let's say, 6gb. After packing with free arc (with the best compression) the game has 5gb. But I know it is possible to pack it more because I've seen the same game packed to 3gb. I think this is due to precomp and srep

If you've seen the 3gb version of the game then it probably was as so called Repack. Its hard to predict how it was crafted. The repacker can easily cut some language resources except the original from it, or unpack the resource containers if the game supports the execution with unpacked res., or encode PCM data with lossy encoder and decode back to PCM during installation. Or even re-encode video to lower bitrate. So it just can be the shrinked version.

but when I pack this 5gb.arc arhive whith precomp or srep it doesn't change anything. The size of the game is sometimes even bigger or stay more or less the same.

No no. Trying to precomp the ARC archive with precomp is wrong. First you must feed the game files to Precomp to see if it can process them. Then SREP and finaly some archiver. ARC in your case.

And also in most games movies are i .bik file. Is there any way to pack such files, 'cause they seem to be unpackable.

Well, they're already compressed so don't expect too much effect from compressing it. With some archivers you can shave off about 3-5 % from it. Maybe 10% if you're lucky and use some hard compressor.

[Bulat Ziganshin]

if ypu know Russian, it's better to write here:
http://forum.ru-board.com/topic.cgi?forum=5&topic=30239
http://forum.ru-board.com/topic.cgi?forum=5&topic=32025

shortly:
1. combine files together using "arc -m0 -dm0"
2. process archive with precomp
3. process output with srep
4. compress output with "arc -mx"