Half-life 2 cache files

[Mixael]

Hi all,
I am making a half-life 2 steam backup dvd and I decided to put them all in a self-extracting rar to make it nice & neat and I have found that it has compressed them heaps:
base source shared materials.gcf 1,094,562,332 -> 565,863,473
base source shared sounds.gcf 1,019,383,208 -> 836,426,175
base source shared models.gcf 481,222,360 -> 162,880,269
base source shared.gcf 68,968,420 -> 8,986,347
half-life 2 base content.gcf 879,090,204 -> 428,340,991

This is just using Normal compression in winrar taking it from 3.29gb down to just 1.86gb

Could I please have someone do a crc32 checksum on there files to see if mine are corrupt. I know the gcf files probly have no compression in them but this much compression when I put them in rar doesn't seem right.

I just got these crc32 from the files in the rar
base source shared materials.gcf 9E7EC550
base source shared sounds.gcf F7A482D8
base source shared models.gcf B2922307
base source shared.gcf D4634713
half-life 2 base content.gcf 31008F02

If this is right I really feel sorry for the people who have downloaded it with a slow connection when it takes up a fraction of that amount when compressed

Michael

 

[YellowPeril]

i did this also today, but included cs:s also. i went from 4.23 Gb to 2.34Gb. that was with best compression and a solid archive. i was quite shocked as well. they really should have compressed stuff better for downloading, you are right.

 

[JPack]

The material is compressed when you download it from Steam. The guys at Valve aren't that foolish.

 

[Mixael]

oh ok that makes sense it downloaded alot faster then I expected. So it kind of extracts the data while its downloading? Thats pretty kool.

 

[FISKER_Q]

The material is compressed when you download it from Steam. The guys at Valve aren't that foolish.

Yeah i believe Gabe did mention something about the download being aproximately 2GB, which is almost the size of it compressed.

It's not very unusual to compress the data sent. Then you can leave the actual crunching to the clients(decompressing). And save bandwitdh.