R Soul on 7/8/2016 at 21:40
There are a couple of FM loaders that support the 7z format, but with the better compression of 7z we also get reduced performance.
I've just released (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=146917) NewDarkLoader (works like FMSel, looks like Darkloader). This displays the readme of the selected FM. When looking for the its title, it also looks in titles.str and missflag.str. If you create a 7z archive in one go, and your FM is large, it'll take NDL a long time to access the files. Any other program will also take a long time.
Please create 7z archives in two stages instead:
1) Add everything
except the readme and the strings folder.
2) Add the readme and strings folder to the existing 7z archive.
This makes very little difference to file compression, but it makes data access very quick because the readme/strings block is tiny.
Nameless Voice on 8/8/2016 at 14:33
You could also make the archive non-solid, though that will probably make it noticeably bigger.
For reference: "solid" means that all of the files in the archive are compressed together as if they are a single file, allowing the algorithm to find common sections of different files and only store them once.
In non-solid archives, each file is compressed separately, meaning that if there's some common section in multiple files, it will need to compress each one individually. However, it also means that any given file can be quickly and easily accessed from inside the archive without needing to look at the entire archive (as would be needed in a solid archive.)
Zip files are, by definition, non-solid archives, that's why they are so good for random access.
I'd guess that when you add files to an existing .7z, it only adds the new files as solid between them, rather than uncompressing and recompressing everything inside the archive as a new solid block, which is why your solution works.
