In TSW2 DTG managed to reduce the size of DLC files by about 3 times - from 11-12 GB to 4-5 GB. TSW5 in da house and again DLC are approaching the mark of more than 10 GB. DTG, could you find a more efficient compression method or is there nothing you can do? Because in addition to the size of DLCs, their number is also growing. Soon 1 TB will not be enough.
I have all dlc expect 3 and i have 363GB so 1TB is not near! And 1 of them is a route thats Cane Creek the other 2 are rolling stock so small size is missing.
Fairly certain it’s 16Gb on PC though guess that will be added to by shaders compiling. Although for PC, mechanical HD’s for PC’s are fairly cheap now it is still rather large file size. Suspect my TSW base game and DLC’s now taking up nearly 300Gb.
People want longer routes and with more detail and then complain because its taking up more storage, you can't have both.
Who's complain? It was the question "could you find a more efficient compression method?". The question is important because people have a habit of installing other games for some reason(as if they need something besides TSW). I'm also sure that many objects are copy-pasted from DLC to DLC, and are included 100 times cause "it needs to be standalone". It is possible to make a basic pool of constantly used objects in the core of the game, which expansions will refer to, thereby reducing the size of DLC files. Many people are not interested in HDD because of a low speed, and in other hand SSD needs a free space for normal operation.
DLC sizes could be greatly reduced with shared assets and rolling stock libraries, but at this point it will never happen. But imagine if you shouldn't need to store 25 copies of the very same building model just because 25 routes use them! Or if you wouldn't need several copies of the exact same locomotive.
plenty storage here just for train simulator games 4tb 370 GB so far now needed for TSW 5 253 GB for Railworks (Train Simulator Classic 2024)
I'm guessing there's not much more they can do. I just ran the 8 gb Cajon Pass PAK file thru 7-Zip and got a whopping 4% savings, and that's hardcore compression meant for storage. On-the-fly compression would be even less (and would require yet more CPU and RAM overhead). Matt's said that would mean that any problem in the shared asset would then be affecting every route it's included in and thus requiring fixes to be tested in every one of the routes. Keeping each a closed ecosystem as much as possible minimizes that.
Compressing already compressed stuff will never produce good results. You could try extracting the pak (assuming there's tools to do so) into its raw form and try 7zipping that using the highest compression and (if they're present, not used 7z in a while) enabling the solid block and media compression settings
It's not just a capacity issue - even with a SSD the load times are getting ridiculous. My old ZX Spectrum games used to load faster off cassette....
