Compactor VS w64devkit

You can already do the very basic version of that by using Compactor. Essentially it uses Windows 10's compression algorithms to make your games smaller. A lot of variance between games based on what their files consist of, but I generally get ~25% more space on my drives. Of course, a single update to the game might mean that you have to pack them again, but it's still a pretty good upside with practically no performance loss.

This will also help.

ARK practically needs its own 500GB SSD, specially if you start installing mods on top of having all of the DLCs. However, it's possible to bring down its size massively if you use this software, it works exceptionally well in ARK, being able to reduce it to about half its size. For example, my ARK installation went from like 320 GB to 175 I believe, which is still huge, but only about as much as any modern AAA game.

You can chuck compact.exe at it by hand (use the /exe option), or if you'd prefer to avoid the command line there's my Compactor tool, or the venerable CompactGUI.

They actually don't compress it. Using a simple compressor like this one for instance, the size decreases by half, if not a bit more than it. Tested it with the base game and it went from 200GB to 100GB.

I should press on and finish my Compactor rewrite, I guess.

7zip, microsoft powertoys (useful utilities n stuff), hyper-v (VM stuff), OBS, optimizer (https://github.com/hellzerg/optimizer) (privacy stuff + system tweaks), compactor (https://github.com/Freaky/Compactor) (uses windows compact.exe and provides a GUI for a otherwise cmd based tool) also qbittorrent

Try w64devkit https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit

Click "View raw" to download. The executable is just ~3kB. If you'd like to try building it yourself, I distribute a Windows XP-friendly, no-installation-required C and C++ toolchain, w64devkit. The 32-bit toolchains are labeled "i686" (on the right under "Releases"). The build command (cc ...) is at the top of the source file.

I bundle my preferred tools together in a standalone compiler toolkit for Windows: w64devkit. Except Git and documentation (see the links in the README), that's essentially everything I need to be productive.

I have a Dockerfile here that goes through all the steps bootstrapping a Mingw-w64 toolchain from source: https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit

FWIW, both GNU objcopy and GNU ld (including e.g. the XCOPY-deployable ones from w64devkit[1]) are perfectly capable[2] of turning binary data into MSVC-acceptable COFF files with start and end symbols, while Free Pascal, for example, straight up ships with a bin2obj tool; the MSVC toolset is the outlier here.

[1] https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit

[2] https://www.devever.net/~hl/incbin

Sounds like an high priority issue to solve first. I distribute a toolchain that doesn't require installation and includes a debugger: w64devkit (see "Releases"). You can pluck out the gdb.exe since it's statically linked and doesn't depend on anything else in the kit.

This particular case is a Windows program due to Winsock, and I happen to include all the above tools, except SDL2, a small Mingw-w64 distribution, w64devkit. So it doesn't take much!

Similar project providing slightly fewer tools: https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit