Compile downloded Renpy Game into .rpa or play as a .zip archive? Possible?

[Smarmint]

Many developers don't bother to compile their games, and I end up with 8,000+ tiny files after extracting it. This takes forever to copy because of the thousands of files. Is there any quick way to compile the .jpg or .png files into a .rpa of a downloaded game?

Or even better, I've never heard of this being possible, but is there a tool out there that lets you play a RenPy game that is still in the original downloaded .zip archive? Without extracting it? This would solve this problem.

 

[anne O'nymous]

Many developers don't bother to compile their games, and I end up with 8,000+ tiny files after extracting it. This takes forever to copy because of the thousands of files. Is there any quick way to compile the .jpg or .png files into a .rpa of a downloaded game?

RPA aren't compressed files, but aggregated ones. The files resulting will not be really smaller than the sum of all separated files, and generally is a little bigger than it. The goal being to speed-up a little the image loading by benefiting from the OS an disk cache memory.
As side effect, it will also limit the disk occupation, but this wouldn't really change your problem. The copy of a RPA file wouldn't be more than 3 or 4 percent faster than the copy of all the files stored in it.

This being said, there's a small DOS script that act as interface for one of the available RPA tools. It's available here.

 

[Smarmint]

Thanks, I will check it out. Maybe it is just me, but when I move a game to another drive where the files are all in .rpa form, it takes about a minute or less, but when it is 10,000 tiny .jpgs or .pngs it can take 10 minutes or more.

It is a first world problem, I know, haha. I was just wondering if there was a batch file or something I could use or write myself that could automate the aggregation of all the little files into .rpa files. It looks like your rpa.bat might do just what I need. I will try it out.
Thanks.

 

[anne O'nymous]

Thanks, I will check it out. Maybe it is just me, but when I move a game to another drive where the files are all in .rpa form, it takes about a minute or less, but when it is 10,000 tiny .jpgs or .pngs it can take 10 minutes or more.

It's because there's many files, but in this case, why you don't move the archive to the right disk, right after you downloaded it, then and only then, extract the game ?

 

[Smarmint]

That is a good point, I should do that. What I do, actually, is move them back and forth to my local computer and a storage drive, based on whether I want to play it right now or not, since my local drive is much faster but has limited storage space, but you are right, I should just leave it in the original archive until I am ready to play it.

Thanks for the suggestion.