Slack Space

Infinisearch · Post by **Infinisearch** » February 12th, 2006, 7:38 am

I noticed that after a fresh install of wesnoth, that the 73MB that is supposed to be taken up is actually 144MB. I was wondering if the developers planned on moving assets into compressed files along the lines of pk3 files for quake3 or something?

appleide · Post by **appleide** » February 12th, 2006, 8:24 am

Then... You couldnt look into the text files and learn WML... Or are you talking about compressing other stuff?

Post by **Soliton** » February 12th, 2006, 8:35 am

The media formats wesnoth uses mostly already support compression, so I'm pretty sure it wouldn't help much.

Btw my wesnoth installations use from 75MB to 92MB (75MB being the newest version). How much space a build uses also depends for example on the way it was built, which filesystem you install it on...

Infinisearch · Post by **Infinisearch** » February 12th, 2006, 11:47 am

appleide - if you are familiar with quake3 they use something called pk3 files which are essentially zip files, in fact i think you can open them with winzip or winrar.

Soliton - the partition my wesnoth install is on is using 16kb clusters, so I know not all people are affected but it would be nice for those of us who are stuck with large cluster sizes.

Some stats for my 16kb partition wesnoth 1.1.1 install with heiress to the throne and Taki + Imperial Era installed.

png files - 26,127,337 bytes - 78,462,976 bytes used

slack = 52335639 bytes

cfg files - 2,172,502 bytes - 10,895,360 used

slack = 8722858 bytes

total slack space for cfg and png files 61058497 bytes.
approx 58MB of slack just in pngs and cfgs.

Anyhow not really the right place for this but congratulations on the 1.1.1 release and it is really looking beautiful.

scott · Post by **scott** » February 12th, 2006, 1:02 pm

So you're saying that the game's png files, which total ~21 MB and are already compressed in png format, take up more than triple that amount because they're separate files and your file system gives it twice as much space as a result? What is the benefit of a 16 kb block size partition anyway? Using 75 MB for 21 MB of files doesn't sound like a selling point to me.

Post by **Soliton** » February 12th, 2006, 1:07 pm

Infinisearch wrote: Soliton - the partition my wesnoth install is on is using 16kb clusters, so I know not all people are affected but it would be nice for those of us who are stuck with large cluster sizes.

Build wesnoth with libzipios++ and the game will be able to handle zip files. There are issues with it like slow startup however.

Post by **Dave** » February 12th, 2006, 4:42 pm

scott wrote:So you're saying that the game's png files, which total ~21 MB and are already compressed in png format, take up more than triple that amount because they're separate files and your file system gives it twice as much space as a result?

Yes, many file systems do this. There are speed advantages in the file system for laying it out in this way.

If you're using a file system like that, clearly you (or the system designers) want to prioritize speed over space. We wouldn't try to thwart them by trying to put things in a format that does the opposite.

Disk space is cheap anyhow. It is not a design goal of Wesnoth to minimize the amount of disk space an installation consumes.

David

Infinisearch · Post by **Infinisearch** » February 15th, 2006, 6:13 am

- Scott -
" What is the benefit of a 16 kb block size partition anyway? Using 75 MB for 21 MB of files doesn't sound like a selling point to me."

Depending on your OS you might not have a choice in choosing a cluster size, it is dependent on the Filesystem implementation.

-Soliton-
I usually download the prebuilt binaries, but if i were to compile with libzipios++, wouldn't I still manually have to set the cfg files to look in the zip files instead of a plain old directory or is that somehow taken care of automatically? If manually how does one specify a zip file in the path in the cfg files?

-Dave-
"If you're using a file system like that, clearly you (or the system designers) want to prioritize speed over space. We wouldn't try to thwart them by trying to put things in a format that does the opposite."

I really don't understand what you mean by this, could you clarify what you mean exactly?

"Disk space is cheap anyhow. It is not a design goal of Wesnoth to minimize the amount of disk space an installation consumes."

Fair enough, is this true in the overall or will it become a consideration once a final release (all art complete,tweaking...) comes into being?

Post by **Soliton** » February 15th, 2006, 1:31 pm

Infinisearch wrote:Depending on your OS you might not have a choice in choosing a cluster size, it is dependent on the Filesystem implementation.

Interesting, what ancient OS would that be?

Infinisearch wrote:I usually download the prebuilt binaries, but if i were to compile with libzipios++, wouldn't I still manually have to set the cfg files to look in the zip files instead of a plain old directory or is that somehow taken care of automatically?

Automatically if you do a "zip-install".

Infinisearch wrote:Fair enough, is this true in the overall or will it become a consideration once a final release (all art complete,tweaking...) comes into being?

There is a stable version out you know.