Haven't tried it, but my gut feeling would be that it would suck. Do you play all the games currently on that HD, or do you just keep them to maintain saves/settings/etc in case you play it again sometime? Is there any way you can use an external HDD to store the ones you don't currently access, or even put just CoX on the external and then you can take it with you wherever you go?
.....And do you have any idea how hard it is for me to not joke about what else you must have on that HDD if it's full? >.<
I know people have run it off of flashdrives.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
Dang... I haven't compressed a drive since Win 3.1.
Personal recommendation, drop a few bucks and get a new hard drive. You can either install all your games on the new drive, or if you're not feelin' that froggy just use it for the Windows swap file. Having all your games on one drive isn't a bad thing, I do the same. I just happen to have a huge hard drive for my games. =P
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Haven't tried it, but my gut feeling would be that it would suck. Do you play all the games currently on that HD, or do you just keep them to maintain saves/settings/etc in case you play it again sometime? Is there any way you can use an external HDD to store the ones you don't currently access, or even put just CoX on the external and then you can take it with you wherever you go?
.....And do you have any idea how hard it is for me to not joke about what else you must have on that HDD if it's full? >.<
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I may do that Tekka, I do have an external USB drive for system backups. Copying the other games to it wouldn't hurt.
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I share the same feeling as Tekka. This is probably not a good idea.
Running it off a flash drive/external hard drive will probably be faster than running it off a compressed drive. Or if you can cut down on the amount of installed games you have.
I wanna run it from my iPod Touch... just need a dev to program it for finger gestures and the accelerometer 
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One thing to take into account is that the majority of the CoH files, the pigg directory, are already compressed and you won't gain much space out of compressing it further.
For example, the biggest file in the directory, the texMisc.pigg, 202,293 kb, only shrank down to 197,812 kb when I ran RAR over it. Zip only brought it down to 199,792 kb.
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I share the same feeling as Tekka. This is probably not a good idea.
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Wait, which one of us are you insulting? You should think better of yourself than that. I'm completely nutters.
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One thing to take into account is that the majority of the CoH files, the pigg directory, are already compressed and you won't gain much space out of compressing it further.
For example, the biggest file in the directory, the texMisc.pigg, 202,293 kb, only shrank down to 197,812 kb when I ran RAR over it. Zip only brought it down to 199,792 kb.
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Thx for the info, its appreciated. I'm currently moving about 80 gb over to the USB drive so that should significantly free up some drive space.
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Oh and just FYI. The reason it would not be a good idea is because the compressed files have to be decompressed before they are used, so it adds a lot of access time to the files. Not good for gaming.
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Have any of you tried this? I run all my games from one drive and its getting a tad full. My first inclination is to compress the drive, however that adds access time because each file has to be uncompressed at run time to be read. So before I compress the drive I'm just curious if anyone has run COH or other games in a compressed state and had any issues or not.
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If yer using Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or 7, dont compress the whole drive. Instead set it to compress only old files. Files you haven't accessed in a long time will be compressed and files you have used currently will not. This may create a bit more space, and it won't have a performance hit on access time for current files.
In my world, compressing an entire drive is pretty much considered a stone knife and bearskin approach to a technical problem. I never hear of anyone compressing a entire drive anymore. The performance hit is costly.
If at all possible.. new bigger drive. If not possible try compressing old files first before the whole drive.
Good luck.
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I know people have run it off of flashdrives.
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Know any details about that? I'm going on vacation soon and I wouldn't mind being able to take the game with me on the odd chance I get to play it.
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One thing to take into account is that the majority of the CoH files, the pigg directory, are already compressed and you won't gain much space out of compressing it further.
For example, the biggest file in the directory, the texMisc.pigg, 202,293 kb, only shrank down to 197,812 kb when I ran RAR over it. Zip only brought it down to 199,792 kb.
[/ QUOTE ]On the other hand, he's saying that the drive is nearing full; it's not necessarily the CoH files that need to be compressed, but the drive in general.
As for access times, it does matter for files that are accessed repeatedly, but if a file is accessed only once, or infrequently, the fact that it's compressed doesn't really matter. As SG points out, piggs are already compressed, so the game must uncompress them to access the files they contain anyway. Compressing them again may add a little bit to your load times and/or affect your fps as you move through the city (with Windows uncompressing the file before the game uncompresses it again), but in general you should be fine.
I do know that some files placed in the /data directory will be read frequently, as I discovered recently installing Vanden's Power Icon Fix to Test while I had Test running. The icons in my tray changed before my eyes as the files were copied over. On the other hand, not all files in the /data directory will do this. My QuickChat mod only reads the file when you launch the game, for example.
In short, you shouldn't see much of a performance hit to a compressed CoH directory, but I can't say for whatever else you've got installed on that drive.
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Have any of you tried this? I run all my games from one drive and its getting a tad full. My first inclination is to compress the drive, however that adds access time because each file has to be uncompressed at run time to be read. So before I compress the drive I'm just curious if anyone has run COH or other games in a compressed state and had any issues or not.
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