rar versus zip for large files?

[Nikolas]

You're both right, but esper keep it down. Don't let them know. I like it this way. hehe

Sorry I have to say this: I think that I have a habbit of making the first post in every second page in the Gen forums... Once again post #20 is mine!

[Gilbert]

Ok, I know this may sound silly, but why not just keep WinAce installed for whenever you have to extract ACE? Works for me.

Because 1. I don't wanna use pirated software, and most important of all, 2. I don't like WinAce.

[Ishmael]

7-zip has so far extracted everything I've come across... on the days of this new PC that is, on the old one I had Winzip, Winrar and 7-zip installed. It was a bit of a rumble to cope with the three, so I set .zips to open with Winrar... worked, for the time being. But 7-zip seems much better than Winrar, userfriendlynesswise. Personally I don't (anymore) have a problem which format it is.

[esper]

Obviously, if the program still runs after thirty days, it can't be too terrible to keep running it even though you are technically supposed to uninstall it (and then a little screwing around in the windows system registry makes it so you can just reinstall it Ã, :o ) but cracks and hacked serials are like saying "I know I'm doing wrong, but I'm going to do it anyway." I use them, don't get me wrong, but it's only if I have the program but lost the CD case that had the serial on it. Nevertheless, I also think it makes sense to say that WinZip couldn't charge, because then some nerdy teenager would make a clone and give it away. However, I think I would still pay thirty bucks for a professional program over using some crummy nerd-made Visual Basic program with one "dekumpres" button and an "eggsit" menu.

[Ishmael]

Oh, 7-zip can't extract ACE, and if it ever will is unknown. So I don't like .ace then - atleast not yet.

[InCreator]

I'd say - RAR it.
Yes, there was time when all people foolisly preferred ZIP over internet, but it's about to end, at least I have noticed much more rar packs everywhere. .ACE may be the one not everyone could open yet, but RAR has became at least as popular as zipping. Plus, it's smaller AND can have split volumes, which is like - first thing a packer should be able to do! fuck zip

[Paper Carnival]

I prefer .rar. Assuming that I have completed games, I consider anyone who does not know how to get the game out of the .rar archive as unworthy to play them.

I don't mind self-extracters, I always right click on them and select "run with win-zip" or whatever.

[Trisk]

Hmmm...sounds like the general concensus is that RARs are OK to use? Nobody said if they'd ever uploaded a file as a RAR and had problems with people not knowing what to do with it...?

[InCreator]

If you're talking about adventure games, well -

People who can't figure out what to do with RAR are probably very young generation - who usually isn't attracted to adventure genre at all, or simply too stupid and not worth being worried about. These people won't get to play your game anyway, and won't figure rar-thing out even if you'd add long tutorial along with link or a whole  video about how to unpack the game. I wouldn't care so much.

Who gets rar open, gets to play the game.
Who won't, isn't probably wanting enough so hell with them.

If I was you, I wouldn't care too much about everyone to learn to use computer or archiving program.
Also, I'd make a simple webpage where is both the game link and line like:

"The game is packed in RAR format, in case of problems getting it open, get an archivator from www.rarlabs.com" or something like that (erg, bad english)

[RickJ]

Hmmm, after reading all this I wonder how much size difference there actually is between ZIP and RAR using AGS 2.71, which now. 

From 2.71 Beta Thread

The second change is optional sprite compression. There is a new option in the General Settings tab to compress sprites. This is done with a basic RLE compression scheme, but it should reduce the sprite file size by about 70%.

Isn't RAR a M$ thing?  I have been weening myself of that dependancy for several years now and don't want to lock myself into yet another one.  So are there RAR decompressors for MAC and Linux?   Does 7-zip run on Linux or Mac and isn't it open source? 

In any case since more people can  deal with ZIP, I will stay in the dark ages for the time being and stick with ZIP.   

[Pumaman]

People who can't figure out what to do with RAR are probably very young generation - who usually isn't attracted to adventure genre at all, or simply too stupid and not worth being worried about.

Ey? Loads of people who aren't really "into" computers don't know what to do with RAR files, but almost anyone can open a ZIP file (since XP has it built-in). Sticking with ZIP is the most sensible option if you want to reach as wide an audience as possible.

[strazer]

So are there RAR decompressors for MAC and Linux?  Does 7-zip run on Linux or Mac and isn't it open source?

For Linux, there are unrar and p7zip.

[Ozzie]

I would say 7zip. Sure, it's not really popular, but what does that mean?

Every package program I know supports it, like WinRAR, Izarc, UltimateZip and probably even WinZip then, although I can't tell because I haven't used it in ages.
There's no more hassle with it.
I would say RAR is a much less supported format because with the exception of WinRAR there's no other application with which you can create a RAR-package. This tells us that it is a corporate format, while 7z is open-source, and don't we love that?

I'm not sure if this makes enough sense, but at such a late/early hour (4am?) I don't really care anymore....

[Gilbert]

Well I like 7zip very much but in my opinion it's still not popular enough to be a preference for publicly released stuff (on the other hand it's a good idea to have 7ziped self extracting packages, like what they did with the GIMP window$  installer, and possibly source packages which are not that public anyway, I'm never a *nix fan, so I don't like those tar-?z stuff). Here're my prefered order for public archives:

ZIP
LHA/LZH (Yeah)
7Z
RAR
ARJ
CAB (WTF?)
ACE

[SSH]

Interestingly, the LZMA compression used by 7zip is downloadable as an SDK http://www.7-zip.org/sdk.html and can be used any way CJ likes if unmodified, so maybe he'd like to add it to AGS 2.72?

[modgeulator]

I agree with InCreator. Use the most bizarre, arcane compression format you can find, then the first puzzle in your game can be "how do I extract the game to play it." You'll be extending and enhancing the gameplay. Pure genius!

[Gilbert]

Interestingly, the LZMA compression used by 7zip is downloadable as an SDK http://www.7-zip.org/sdk.html and can be used any way CJ likes if unmodified, so maybe he'd like to add it to AGS 2.72?

For what? Backgrounds in rooms?
For speed concerns, as far as I know, apart from backgrounds (and now, sprites, which adopts only RLE compression for speed issue), mostly all of the data in an AGS game are not compressed.

[Haddas]

On the subject of compression, read the article on this site. http://www.donationcoder.com/Reviews/Archive/ArchiveTools/