Compressed Modules

[tpkurilla]

Greetings!

I've nearly completed my first module. I've exported it, and I can access all of the portions that I've completed...just like in the tutorial video.

But I'm having an issue. My .mod file is HUGE compared to all the other modules. When I open it up with 7-zip, it shows that nothing is compressed!

How can I get my module to write out compressed? My players are taking forever to connect to me.

What's really weird to me is that I don't have that module accessible by the players. So I don't understand why the huge module is being cached by the clients...it's marked as not player-accessble.

Any ideas?

-Thomas

[EugeneZ]

Not sure why your players are taking a long time to connect, but you can fix the compression problem by just recompressing the contents of the module in 7zip. A .mod file is just a zip file with a different extension. I don't know if you can "in-place" recompress, but if not, just extract the contents of the mod, then compress them with 7zip, then rename the output to .mod.

[Tenian]

Do not use 7 Zip.

Unless something has changed, the variant offshoot compressions are not supported.

Use just "regular" PK zip.

[Zeus]

I would recommend WinRAR over PK ZIP. WinRAR supports the ZIP compression method and I generally find it does a better compression job than PK ZIP itself.

WinRAR works very well for modules extensions and the newer ruleset PAK files.

[EugeneZ]

I use 7zip and it works fine.

[Griogre]

If you have Vista or Win7 I'd suggest you just use the build in compression ie Send to Compressed Folder. As been stated you want plain zip to be safe.

Be aware some compression utilities are "helpful" and will change the .mod file extension to .zip for you if you copy/move/dowload a mod file. If you don't have show file extensions on this will cause FG modules to mysteriously quit working. I believe WinZip and WinRAR are among those "helpful" utilities, though internal settings on the utilites might stop this behavior.

Personally, I use Ultimate Zip because of features that have nothing to do with FG. But I don't use it to build modules by hand.