@kaia btw if you want to see some retro show about the topic, there was one called 'welcome to the scene', where nearly all of the drama was happeing via instant messengers. by now it's 20 years old: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC2FCB2871C396459

@kaia it's a male-only hobby, you wouldn't know about it. it's people who take scene releases (i.e., games), bundle them with cracks and then 'repack' them so that they are smaller.

@lain @kaia well, it did start out when 500 megabytes mattered, i don't imagine anyone new who doesn't care about 500mb is joining and old habits die hard

@vaartis @kaia also they are all hyperautistic in their scene... i do kinda get it but it's still annoying.

@lain @kaia what i don't really get is why scene releases are just completely uncompressed, surely at least some compresion wouldn't hurt. but i guess they do just be dumping the game as is

@vaartis @kaia it's 'the rulez', i guess

@lain @kaia all we can do is reap the benefits of their work and if you don't like one repack, there's almost always another one by someone else (well, nowadays I'm not sure sure, but back then there were a lot of good ones on rutracker)

@vaartis @kaia reason i found out about all of this is because i'm working on a 'repack unpacker' that isn't a super slow installer with music, but i'll probably not release it publicly, i know those guys care a lot about it.

@lain @vaartis
so it's basically a proprietary compression binary to save storage? why do you need to make an unpacker and not use theirs?

@kaia @vaartis they are kind of a set of rube goldberg machines, it's not regular compression like 7zip, it's decomp/recomp/different compression per file type and so on. and all of those are implemented via 15 year old dlls from russian web forums, so they often break under non-standard situations (for example, wine)