People save replays in NASCAR Racing 2 by Papyrus for a variety of
reasons. Perhaps you race in an offline series and like to keep copies
of your races. Perhaps you collect or trade hotlaps with friends.
Perhaps you ran an online race and just wanted to save the exciting
finish.
In any case, saving replays can become costly in terms of disk space
required to store the files. To help reduce the impact of this,
SealSoft Works is proud to announce the release of the replay
compression programs RPZip for DOS and RPZWin for Windows95.
You may be asking "Why can't I just use PKZIP to compress replays". By
searching for patterns in the data, PKZIP can indeed be used to
effectively reduce the size of a replay by about 30-50%. We felt,
however, that this could be improved upon, especially given the detailed
understanding of the replay file format we gained in creating TLMetry.
As a result, RPZip creates files which are typically 50% smaller than
those created by PKZIP, recovering typically 75-90% of the disk space
used to store the replay.
For example, a 22 Mb 100 lap race replay was compressed to 17 Mb using
PKZIP but took only 8 Mb using RPZip. At the other extreme, a 64 kb
qualifying lap was reduced to 30 kb with PKZIP and only 12 kb with
RPZip. When considering these numbers, keep in mind that RPZip is a
LOSSLESS compression system in which the extracted replays are identical
to the original.
In the spirit of the sim racing community on the net, RPZip and RPZWin
are free for personal use. They, along with all of SealSoft Works'
racing utilities can be found at The Pits or:
http://www.racesimcentral.net/
We welcome any comments or questions you may have, but would like to
point out that responses may be delayed through the holiday season.
Happy Holidays.
Christopher Lund
SealSoft Works