bigbenjam
30th April 2009 16:12 UTC

PAK Files blow the installer size
Hi,

We are developing a pc golf game called ongolf and the game consists of about 20K files, which drives installation time through the roof (20-30 mins on a fast pc). So we added pak file support (here is some more info on that format, in case you haven't hear of it before: http://filext.com/file-extension/PAK (first result)), which turned the files down to a few 100.

But the problem is, that the installer went from 400 MB to several GB, when dealing with the pak files, we have not been able to figure out why or how to fix it so far, so as a result we couldn't use the advantage yet.

Now I was wondering if anyone has experienced sth like this with NSIS before, or if you know an alternative to PAK files which would work with NSIS?

Thank you very much in advance!

Afrow UK
30th April 2009 17:45 UTC

PAK files are similar to Zip files (in fact I think the Quake 3 PK3 format is almost the same). Compressing already compressed files never yields good results I am afraid.

I assume you are using SetCompressor /solid lzma?

Stu

bigbenjam
4th May 2009 10:03 UTC

Thanks for your quick answer, on your question, we use:
SetCompressor /final /SOLID lzma

Any idea on how to get a similar result in the resulting installer size but with using some sort of mechanism to group the 20K files into archives? Maybe use a diffent compression method in the installer, or something other than pak files?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

kichik
10th May 2009 16:05 UTC

You need a better format than PAK that would also use solid compression.