Newbie Question Thread

[Ra7eN]

Hi, thanks for the reply!
I’ve tried a few different tools, and in my experience, when it comes to compressing (not ripping), there’s usually only a minor reduction in size. Using methods like Precomp and SREP with either ARC or 7z, the results typically fall within a 10–20% range, depending on the game and file structure. Of course, larger games might show more variance, but that’s not always the case.

I haven’t used "lolz" yet—I actually thought it was an emoji at first, haha! I’ll definitely have to check that one out.

[Masquerade]

Lolz is an archiver designed specifically for game texture data such as DDS (DXT#) images. It's slower than lzma but is multithreaded and will yield smaller ratios. Out of all tools made by ProFrager, lolz is the most stable.

You may see some overlap between the effectiveness of precomp vs xtool on games compressed with deflate, as both tools support this algorithm. XTool is superior due to having multithreading and a diverse range of supported algorithms. By default there's zlib/deflate, oodle, lz4 and zstd but you can add further codecs and add plug in other algorithms. Over the years I've plugged in doboz and yaz0, for example.

It's all about finding the right algo. If you try to compress a unity lz4 game without the unity lz4 XTool plugin, you'll get an severely larger result, the same result if you used precomp.