The Tips in detail

 "What tool to use for compressing scenery files?"

As you know from the manuals you can directly compress scenery files from inside Max. The default method used is using the ZIP-engine to reduce space needed on the media. ZIP makes some good results, but there are better tools out there.

One time - after intense wrestling with a scene - I had a folder holding as much as 496 files piling up to some 670 MB used to store them uncompressed. Using WinZIP I got this wrenched down to one archive of some 250 MB size.

A co-student told me about WinRAR, a more decent archiving tool. Using this tool made the same 670 MB-folder to one 162 MB archive, being 90 MB ahead of Winzip in almost a third of the time WinZIP needed tocreate the archive. The RAR archive was created containing so-called recovery info, providing a certain amount of chance to resurrect a damaged archive.

Further, WinRAR has options using certain multimedia compression, providing an extra gain in compression on images, which WinZIP does not have.

I converted another Zip-archive (some 60 MB compressed, aprox. 210 MB uncompressed) into RAR and ended up with a 32 MB archive. Another project really blew my mind: the files uncompressed piled up to some 1.2 GB. Using ZIP this was wrenched down to some 200MB but RAR made from the same folder a handy 20 (twenty) MB archive, a tenth of what WinZIP produced.

WinZIP and WinRAR can be found almost anywhere on the net. The WinZIP homepage can be found at http://www.winzip.com, WinRAR's homepage is located at http://www.rarsoft.com