I mainly use 7zip to zip up my mods, which has been working reliably up until now. For some reason though, some of my .zip files are turning out to be larger than the files inside them, so much so that I had to use the Asset Packer to put my most recent TouhouBound update in a .pak (which, by the way, was 2.5x the size of its contents!) then put that in a .zip just to make it small enough. The problem is starting to affect some of my other mods as well, but for some reason, it does compress Advanced Weaponizer to a smaller size as one would expect. Are there any settings in 7zip that can help me out? tl;dr .zip's being larger than what's inside them. What do. And don't mention winrar, it's giving me the same problem.
If it's an issue with PNGs taking up the most space, then you could try PNGGauntlet to reduce the file size.
Not sure if that's what causes the issue but it's good to see another person who crunches their PNGs.
My PNGs are of reasonable size, the problem is simply that most of my .zips nowadays are far larger than they should be. And I do mean "most of" rather than "all of." Advanced Weaponizer, which is 1.38 MB uncompressed (Hybrid weapons' color palettes take up most of that space), becomes 241 KB when zipped. I'm not sure why that one mod compresses properly as opposed to some of my other mods, and I have no idea how to remedy this problem. I suppose I could start using another file-sharing service such as Mediafire, but I'm saving that as a last resort.
Trying to compress data that's already efficiently compressed (most image, audio, and video formats) can sometimes result in compressed files that are larger than their contents, since the archive format itself has overhead on top of the effectively incompressible data. However, the overhead will never be this drastic, and that's not what is happening in this case. The problem here is that you are trusting Windows to give you an accurate representation of a folder's actual size, and it is not. The folder you show has an actual size of 1.36MB; that 741KB estimate doesn't include the 653KB of thumbnail cache files (thumbs.db) scattered around that folder, and there are probably other such files interfering with compression of your other mods. Windows generates these files when it shows you thumbnails of images in a folder, and they can safely be deleted (and should be if you intend to distribute the contents of a folder), though they'll only show up if hidden and system files are visible. Some googling should help you get rid of them and prevent them from being generated in the future.
Yes but if you wanted to further compress it (after getting rid of the garbage), 7z typically has a higher compression ratio than zip archives.
You're right. A little testing on the swords folder from my mod, with all the PNG files crunched and JSON as small as it gets without reducing readability, shows 8.35 KB for 7z, 15.4 KB for rar (solid), and 69.4 for zip, from a 145 KB source . I'll grant you that. The OP already used 7zip from the start, though, to make zip files. And wanted to know how the zip files came out so large. As for "why would OP use 7z to make zip files", perhaps because the Chuckefish uploader doesn't like 7z files? "zip, txt, pdf, png, jpg, jpeg, jpe, gif, psd, tif, rar" it says.
I know you said it was for further compression in your next reply but you'd be amazed how many people ask what the file you've given them is, what they're supposed to do with it or where to place it. Stick to .modpak or .zip. Some people even use Windows built-in zip extractor which does the job but doesn't really extract anything other than just zips.
