http://constexpr.org/innoextract/#use

https://github.com/dscharrer/innoextract/issues/37

It appears at least some, if not all, multipart GOG (Windows) installers use rar? Wasn't that also the reason for the earlier controversy about GOG applying passwords on its rar-compressed installers, causing problems to some non-Windows users?

I also ran into that when trying to "innoextract" a multipart GOG installer yesterday, it complained I should install unrar (not sure how, at least just putting unrar.exe to that same directory didn't work).

That's why I needed to run the innoextract test with a single-part installer (Alan Wake American Nightmare), at least that didn't give the unrar error. Still, even there I didn't really get significant space savings by compressing the innoextracted files with LZMA2 (7zip ultra compression). No idea how compressed the innoextracted files already were.

that only affects a few titles I think. They stopped using that method after the linux/anti-drm crowd went beserk :p
Though it seems they didn't actually go and fix all installers (tz,tz lazy blues ;) )

But i have several multi-part installers that don't use that method and work just fine with innoextract.

You mean they don't need unrar? Or that they are not password protected?

Maybe I just had bad luck then, I think it was the "A New Beginning Final Cut" where innoextract gave me the unrar error.

don't need unrar

isn't BZip faster? i rather have faster decompression than >1% decrease in filesize.

True. In those cases, as you've said, it doesn't really matter what you use to re-compress things with the installer... but for the games which are compressible, the differences between using zip and lzma compression can be significant.

You don't have to take my word for it.

A couple compression tests I ran on a GOG game, that might interest some of you:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/linux_support_on_gog/post1668

If you like this kind of stuff, you might want to go on with this thread on the inXile boards:
https://forums.inxile-entertainment.com/viewtopic.php?p=148219#p148219

At the risk of sounding like a jerk (and I don't mean to, honestly), but if you had bothered to read further along in the thread, you would have seen the post where I mentioned that I had read that information in the post of someone else. As I've already said, each time I attempted download the backup copy via the Galaxy client, the download simply failed after about 1% completion, so I haven't had first hand experience with it. Please, before just jumping on someone for saying something, read the rest of the posts. They may have retracted, corrected, or amended a seemingly false statement.

Moving on, however, I have just downloaded and installed the old GOG downloader linked in the first reply to this thread (thank you, Martek!) and am currently attempting to get my game downloaded this way. I'll let you know if I'm successful.

To anyone else who is just now learning about the old GOG downloader, to add games from your library to the download cue, simply click on desired game in your library, click the "More > " button, then click on the "GOG Downloader Links" option. Choose the appropriate link from the list for your operating system, and the game will be added to your GOG Downloader cue list. You may need to grant your browser permission to open the downloader, but that's as simple as a single mouse click.



EDIT: Having tested out the old GOG downloader, I found that, not only does it still work, but it works better that when I first attempted to use it a few years ago. This version of it didn't decide to suddenly crap out only minutes from completion, and I have already put in about 3 hours of happy gaming with The Walking Dead: Season 2. My next step will be to burn the TWD2 files to a disc, then download KOTOR2 on my next library visit. Thank you again, Martek! You've made this Good Old Gamer one happy fella! :D

I see many people are having similar issues as me. My main criticism is more and more that GOG is not releasing stand alone patches for a lot of the games at their store.

I will use the recent Bards Tale 4 (an excellent game and this in no way is a criticism of the game it self) as an example. I downloaded the day one release which was about 30 gb. Then the patch one was released. There was no stand alone update installer. I was forced to download the entire 30 gb again to update to patch one. SO I thought "OK I will just use Galaxy to update and it will be smaller".

Well that assumption was wrong. The patch download was 26 gb, nearly the size of the full game download. Then patch 2 came along. Same story. So up until patch 2 I had downloaded the game almost 3 times accumulating to a almost whopping 90 gb. And now the third patch is also another 26 gb via galaxy or I can download the full installer again. while on Steam aside from one patch being 25 gb the rest were 3 to 5 gb...which is what it should be on GOG as well.

I love gog and fully support them. They have good quality games. I love their DRM free philosophy but in this thing they are failing to deliver. I know they can do better.

All I ask is that they find a method to make the updates a smaller size like on Steam and for GOG sakes bring back the stand alone patches for the games that dont have them. It was a perfect system. This issue only hurts GOG and developers like InXile. And I can tell you neither need the negativity.