PSA: I compressed BeamNG folder and freed 20GB space

It's quite simple: Right click the folder, go to properties, click Advanced, select " Compress contents to save disk space", click OK, choose "affect all subfolders and files as well", click apply. Wait for 10~20minutes, then 20GB released.

 

Nice! Is there any performance impacts when playing BeamNG in this manner? Like, since the game has to do more work with decompressing things.

 

No noticeable impact, actually it can be beneficial.

File compression speed is largely determined by algorithm. I tested via 7-zip compressing the game manually to .7z using LZMA2 compression and .zip using DEFLATE compression, for the former the CPU is maxed out and compression is slow, but the resulted file is smaller, for the latter the disk read/write is maxed out and the compression is super fast, the resulted zip file is only slightly larger than 7z.

In other words, creating zip files without compression (as in BeamNG's numerous zip files) have identical speed compared to DEFLATEing the files(in properties or creating zips), the latter is actually faster as the resultant file size is smaller

Windows' NTFS filesystem defaults DEFLATE compression when you compress the files and folder via Properties setting. Since the compression speed is already capped by disk, the less-CPU-intensive decompression is also capped by disk. In addition to that, you only need to compress it once. BeamNG's high CPU utilization is for physical calculation, when loading the game the CPU % drops as the bottleneck is disk. Compressing the disk files, at least using DEFLATE, makes the game both smaller on disk and faster upon loading.

 

Update replaced files to non-compressed version, had to deselect compression, apply, then select compression again

EDIT: Happened on my laptop, didn't happen on my desktop, weird.

Sunburst2 zip occupies less than half space when compressed