MachoBastard wrote:I got mostly nothin of what you said doc, haha, now that i know how this engine takes priority on pk3 files seems im gonna be using lots of suffixes for new materials even if they are just slightly different, if not i could screw up previous/future releases.
Well ! Yes Yes ! Don't screw up your devs ! It won't really deserve the goal
Btw I took a look at dm_gstallion.pk3 content. I see stuffs you may want to split in 2 or 3 PK3s:
- Folders levelshots, maps and scripts scripts/q3map2_dm_gstallion-w.shader + scripts/q3map2_dm_gstallion.shader into a dm_gstallion.pk3
- the rest (textures and few scripts) in a new updated machobastard-lib.pk3. Here I can image stuffs are shared between some of your maps. You may even split this into numbered "lib1", "lib2", ... to limit the size of each one
MachoBastard wrote:True, 7zip is the best compression out there that i've tried, i'll look into it for my future releases.
...
Yeah, im not really familiar with linux, ive tried it only a couple times, it's "Awesomeness" is not in question tho, seems i'll be lookin into an alternative, my best guess would be 7z. but i think i said that before
I agree with 7z, this is a good compression tool and well supported under linux, btw...
I don't really see why you should zip a PK3 file with just 2 txt files. You still put the txt files in the PK3 and PK3 is just a ZIP file. The difference between the RAR file and the PK3 is only 1% ! Don't loose your time with that.
I saw most of the heavy image files in dm_gstallion.pk3 are TGA pictures for textures. When zipped, a TGA format is approximatively 10% less heavy. I know this is the format to use for the best quality, btw I must remember you PNG format could be used too and here you'll lower from 15% to 20% the image file size. I agree this would ask for a little more CPU resources to be uncompressed, and would take a little more time, but I don't think this is really relevant.
And finally, in some case, you may even prefer to use JPEG format, the final image size could be 10% to 20% from the original TGA size... Some pictures deserve the best quality format, some other not.
In fact, PNG support for textures is an ioQ3 engine feature and so this is a Smokin'Guns 1.1 feature. This is not supported in Smokin'Guns 1.0.
So here is my opinion: just deliver PK3 files, optimize PK3 size looking toward pictures format.
If we need to discuss more about that, we can split this discussion in another thread as this is not really fully Gray Stallion Manor related