Blade of Agony Chapter 1 released

The included 'boa_c1.exe' triggers two trojan warnings (trojan:Win32/Dotplock and trojan:Win32/Rundes!plock) with MS Security Essentials. Probably false positive, but one might want to take a look at that. Scanning it directly does not trigger any alarms, trying to run it does.

Just uninstall your virus scanner and you'll be fine. No more pop ups. ;)

Mordeth said:

The included 'boa_c1.exe' triggers two trojan warnings (trojan:Win32/Dotplock and trojan:Win32/Rundes!plock) with MS Security Essentials. Probably false positive, but one might want to take a look at that. Scanning it directly does not trigger any alarms, trying to run it does.

Don't worry, it's false alarm, it's only a injected BAT that launches the game properly.

So when I looked in /idgames's /incoming folder today, I had to reject what turned out to be the mod package version of Blade of Agony Chapter 1 because it was over 50 MB in size without prior email notice (see README.INCOMING). More specifically, it was 291 MB. So I downloaded the file from the Realm667 site just to see why it's so huge. Uncompressing the zip, the PK3 turned out to be 356 MB.

In examining the PK3, I found the following:
- 96 MB of music (including music for unreleased episodes)
- 80 MB of textures
- 63.2 MB of models
- 50 MB of maps
- 40.8 MB of sound effects
- 9.63 MB of sprites
- 7.12 MB of brightmaps
- 4.82 MB of miscellaneous graphics

All this for a six-map episode (excepting C1M0 and the INTERMAP). A six-map episode that is about five times the filesize of DUMP 3 (80 maps), and over twice the file size of the previous Realm667 project Stronghold (44 maps). How much of this stuff is even used in this episode? For the sake of players who are still stuck with low-speed connections, Tormentor, you might want to cut out all the stuff not used in this episode to make downloading the "Chapter 1" package easier for them.

(On a side note, the PK3 also contains the WolfenDoom project's PK3 compiler tools, even though this makes no sense for a released product. Whoops!)

The Green Herring said:

Things about the large archive size.

I have a couple ideas:
- Perhaps it would be a good idea to use pk7 instead of pk3 (though the change in filesize is small due to many files already being a compressed filetype)
- Maybe it would help if you cut out the dev stuff from the main release (like ACS source and the like) and include that in a separate archive?

Altazimuth said:

I have a couple ideas:
- Perhaps it would be a good idea to use pk7 instead of pk3 (though the change in filesize is small due to many files already being a compressed filetype)

No, that's what I call a false good idea.

7zip compression lets the file be smaller, but at the expense of costlier decompression. For just transferring the file, it's fine; but for loading in the game, it increases sensibly the loading times.

Gez said:

No, that's what I call a false good idea.

7zip compression lets the file be smaller, but at the expense of costlier decompression. For just transferring the file, it's fine; but for loading in the game, it increases sensibly the loading times.

I figured as much. Makes sense as to why the format isn't as popular for mods. If that's the case then why does ZDoom even support .7z format?

The performance issue was an empirical discovery made quite a while after 7zip support was implemented, as you need to use it for a large archive with a lot of stuff for it to be really apparent. And well, there hasn't been any good reason to remove it.

The Green Herring said:

For the sake of players who are still stuck with low-speed connections, Tormentor, you might want to cut out all the stuff not used in this episode to make downloading the "Chapter 1" package easier for them.

Thanks for the hint Green Herring, what I can definitely do is cutting out the music and the compiler which reduces the ZIP's file to about 250 MB. There are definitely some more objects which aren't used yet in C1 (sprites, models, textures) but tracking them down and removing them is a huge task and I am not sure if saving another 20 MB is worth the effort. Please let me know if the cleaned variant is okay for you before I upload another huge file (which takes a while for me as well :))

250 MB is still quite a lot for six maps—but the primary issue that led to my examining the file was not emailing ahead of time before uploading a file bigger than 50 MB, which has been /idgames policy for years. Just shoot us an email before you do it, and we can discuss issues if any come up. Thank you!

Sure thing, I will take care of that, thanks again.

TGH proves once again dry humor is second to none

Breeder said:

Just uninstall your virus scanner and you'll be fine. No more pop ups. ;)

Worst. Advice. Ever.

Though with the direction virus scanners are going these days, it's tempting.

^ They themselves have become almost as irritating as the viruses they prevent, heh.

Altazimuth said:

I figured as much. Makes sense as to why the format isn't as popular for mods. If that's the case then why does ZDoom even support .7z format?

Well, the answer really isn't much beyond 'Because someone added it', that someone being Randi. Being able to load 7z is fine, but trying to pack a large mod into a solid archive comes with some problems unrelated to the file format as such.

It's also nice because if you can extract the resource manager from ZDoom you got something that already can load lots of file formats, and is certainly far better than what some other libraries come with, which often is just deflated Zip and what makes those implementations useless by design (do you hear me, wxWidgets???)

Graf Zahl said:

It's also nice because if you can extract the resource manager from ZDoom you got something that already can load lots of file formats, and is certainly far better than what some other libraries come with, which often is just deflated Zip and what makes those implementations useless by design (do you hear me, wxWidgets???)

Knowing full well exactly what you are referring to, I wonder if I should try it myself and possibly do a pull request against not-mentioned project. :P But it'd be on a list of very low priority things for me to do.

@Green Herring - I wrote an email about 2 weeks ago but never got a reply. Did that mail got lost maybe? It's just about the "upload" thing for BoA

No, it was replied to the same day, an hour later. Perhaps it was flagged as spam?

On 6.12.2016 at 8:45 AM, The Green Herring said:

No, it was replied to the same day, an hour later. Perhaps it was flagged as spam?

Unfortunately not, I simply didn't get it. Can you resend it to info@realm667.com ?