Downloads

[rhcp]

Hi all. I just got to wondering, I noticed, even for a small but fairly detailed route, its size is around 100-300 meg. How are we (including us 56k users like me) going to upload and download this stuff? Even compressed we're talking 50-150 meg.....redhotchilipeppers™

[Nels_Anderson]

What would you think about having the downloads available on CD-ROM? We're looking into that possibility.

[drewhosick]

When they are zipped they become much smaller

I think the route I uploaded was 80 to 100 megs and went down to 9 so it's about 10:1 compression

Drew

[FireEngine]

I can't find your fico.zip route in the route section anywhere and wanted to download. I checked the route section earlier and saw it but when I logged back on earlier I didn't see it. Please reply to me and let me know where I can find it at. Thanks a lot.

[RailroadKing]

I believe drewhosick is correct about that. If you zip the routes first it should compress it down VERY much. I want to say an average route zipped could be 20 megs.

[drewhosick]

For some reason my route was taken off the downloads.(Probably because it's not much of a file. I just wanted to be able to say I had the first route online. Dont' worry though I'm working on a fictional route right now and it's gonna be much better and not much bigger. Actually the file I had was 9 megs and it was that big because I extracted to many tiles from the Geometry Extractor. I only used a 2 mile long area and I think I extracted about a 10x10 or 10x20 Mile area so there was a lot of extra.

[rhcp]

Well I thought Winzip could only do up to around %50 compression-look at the next zip you get it- it says the compression ratio. So if you got a 200 meg route and compress (I got out a calculator) It told me it would be right at 100 megs!-redhotchilipeppers™

[drewhosick]

Rhcp actually it varies with the file type. If you we're to try to compress a file like a mpg file or an asf movie file you would find that you wouldn't gain that much on compression because these files are already fairly compressed.(That's why you can't take a zip file and try to add it into another zip file to compress it even more because you will not gain anything since the file is already compressed).

But files used in games are made to be the least compressed since compressed files take up more processing power and more time to run which would slow down the frame rate and game considerably. What game makers do is make files as uncompressed as possible so that the game will run faster. The routes are fairly uncompressed so they get I'd say about a 10:1 compression(10 times smaller when compressed). That's why a game such as T.S. is so big. Microsoft could have made the game much smaller but they would be trading off valuable speed and the game would become very processor hungry. Most companies find a balance when programming between program size and compression for the best speed and size choice for a game.

Hope this helps