Lack of compression in repacking process

[TROguz]

(PC) Hi. Tool doesn't work on Other.pak archive.
I didn't change anything. Just repack on tool and game crashed.
Edited archive size huge. So game crashed.
Tool support compress to pak archives?

[Krzyhau]

The bigger size is caused by lack of compression algorithms being implemented in Repacker - it dumps raw texture data into the asset files, which is not space efficient. It's something that I wish to change in the future.

As for the crashing issue, I'm heavily doubting it's related to the large package size. If I remember correctly, the most recently released version of Repacker doesn't convert all of the original assets properly. It has been fixed since then (most notably, in b58a88a and 3f6b7fb), but I haven't released a new version yet. I might do it before the end of this week.

I'm leaving this issue open because proper asset compression is something that should be on my radar.

[TROguz]

Hi again. I've tested new version and tool working but i have a problem. The texts are interwoven.

[TROguz]

I've tested Essentials.pak archive. I have Steam version.
Essentials.pak: https://pixeldrain.com/u/DAhoV85L

[TROguz]

When could you release the new version?

[Krzyhau]

I wanted to fix a couple of other issues before releasing a new version. If I fail to do so, I might just do it tomorrow.
Also, I'm encouraging to join the FEZ: Community Projects Discord server for non-issue related conversations about FEZ modding.

[zrckr]

After doing a little research, I discovered that in the original XNA, compression was handled via the xcompress.dll or xcompress32.dll library. DLL exports XMemCompress* and XMemDecompress* functions, that implement LZX compression. If you replace LzxDecoder with XMemDecompress, the decompression will work as before. Moreover, if you implement packing using XMemCompress, some of the assets will be identical byte-for-byte. That’s all cool, but this method sucks because a) it uses a library from the proprietary XNA SDK, and b) this library is 32-bit, which means the entire FEZRepacker automatically becomes 32-bit. Ideally, we should reverse-engineer the compression algorithm either by analyzing this library or by searching for information online in order to make it truly cross-platform.