I'd like to save some space on the disk and I've heard zstd is a good way to do so, but whenever I try to manually compress a game I get this error(if its relevant, I did use root access and shut down steam). So how do I do that?
#Game compression
bright void
toxic plover
- First, if you archive a game then Steam won't be able to run them in an archived state.
- Second, even compressed, the assets and code from most games will squish down by half at most, and usually less.
- Third, according to Wikipedia:
The Linux kernel has included Zstandard since November 2017 (version 4.14) as a compression method for the btrfs and squashfs filesystems.
So trying to use Zstd manually may not achieve anything that hasn't already happened, depending on your settings.
My advice is you should either copy games you don't play any more onto backup media, or delete the ones you can re-download from Steam. Be warned, Steam's original and primary purpose was as DRM, to stop people from playing games they didn't buy. So either backing games up onto media or archiving them and deleting the original uncompressed version may mean the game no longer works when restored to a working condition by uncompressing it.
bright void
Ive heard this works because people are compresssing games with native windows tools with the help of compact gui just fine
from what I know
and no, files are not compressed even a tiny bit by default
sharp nova
Not sure what people you mention are using, but this is pretty fundamental, a game or program is programmed to handle certain files in certain formats in a certain location, anything else not programmed in will not work.
What could be happening is windows is supporting that kind of compression on a filesystem level and it is looking like normal file to the program. or some third party program running between the program and the OS and doing that translation!?
On Linux, you could use btrfs (a file system, like ext4 is another) and set your compression level between 0 and some large value (20!?) and all your files will be zstd compressed if possible. Then the game or program will not have to do anything.
How much it will benefit depends, what is being compressed, your hardware, etc. For example a bunch of text file will compress to be a super tiny percentage, a bunch of pngs and mp4 will probably just be 99.9x% of original or something, figuratively, they are already compressed, so. And on some hardware the decompression time on higher compression levels might be overall longer than loading in the uncompressed file. 