Version 3.0 alpha 3

[Iridium-IO]

Changes

• Rewrote the backend to no longer use compact.exe and instead directly access the Win32 API for file compression/decompression.
  • This should make CompactGUI even faster especially when compressing folders with lots of tiny files.
  • At absolute worst, it should be no slower than running compact.exe directly, and uses much less CPU power as it's no longer spawning dozens of new processes to try to compensate.
  • Interestingly, the WofSetFileDataLocation function that replaces it has some form of built-in detection to automatically skip files if they're not going to compress well. Neat.
  • The first time you try this version, please use it on a non-essential folder and then check that the files are okay before compressing anything else. I have no reason to suspect there will be issues, but just to be safe :)
  • Subjective benchmark of Stardew Valley which has a lot of tiny files and really crippled the old version:

    Stardew Valley | 700 MB | 6800 Files
    
    compact.exe:         17.34s   Baseline
    CompactGUI v2.6.2:   81.79s   471% slower
    CompactGUI v3 a2:    17.82s   2.7% slower
    CompactGUI v3 a3:    12.95s   25% faster  # probably because it doesn't check files yet

• Added version checker
  • if a new version is available, a banner will show up at the bottom with a link to this page

Fixes

• Fixed progress bar sometimes momentarily starting at 100% if a folder was recently uncompressed

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Important!

Because this application now uses .NET 6, you have two choices of downloads:

• CompactGUI.exe (3.1MB) RECOMMENDED
  • If you don't have the .NET 6 runtime installed when you try to run this, it will prompt you to download it from Microsoft
• CompactGUI-Integrated.zip (150MB extracted) NOT RECOMMENDED
  • Includes all libraries required to run it completely standalone, however it's nearly 50x the size. I do recommend installing the .NET 6 runtime instead (which is itself only a 50MB download).

File Checksums

MD5: 		F8D18BA39768F4906FACF44D49814133
SHA-256: 	07A7D2F4B1CEEE49AECB39435F9C25AF5A259FB005BC2C6F17B5F07C3D6E9DF5

Full Changelog: v3.0.0-alpha.2...v3.0.0-alpha.3

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This discussion was created from the release Version 3.0 alpha 3.