Download Times Matter
Sean Cooper, Ryan Inselmann and I have been building a custom lossless archiver designed specifically for Unity asset bundle files. The archiver itself uses several well-known techniques in the hardcore archiving/game repacking world. This post is mostly about how we've begun to tune the LZMA settings used by the archiver to be more effective on Unity asset bundle data. We'll cover the actual archiver in a later post.
LZMA has several knobs you can turn to potentially improve compression:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3057171/lzma-compression-settings-details
The LZHAM codec (my faster to decode alternative to LZMA) isn't easily tunable in the same way as LZMA yet, which is a flaw. I totally regret this because tuning these options works:
Total asset bundle asset data (iOS): 197,514,230
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3057171/lzma-compression-settings-details
The LZHAM codec (my faster to decode alternative to LZMA) isn't easily tunable in the same way as LZMA yet, which is a flaw. I totally regret this because tuning these options works:
Total asset bundle asset data (iOS): 197,514,230
Unity's built-in compression: 91,692,327
Our archiver, un-tuned LZMA: 76,049,530Our archiver, tuned LZMA (48 option trials): 75,231,764
Our archiver, tuned LZMA (225 option trials): 74,154,817
LZ codecs with untunable models/settings are much less interesting to me now. (Yet one more thing to work on in LZHAM.)
Here are the optimal settings we've found for each of our Unity asset classes on iOS. So for example, textures are compressed using different LZMA options (3, 3, 3) vs. animation clips (1, 2, 2).
Best LZMA settings after trying all 225 options. (In case of ties the compressor just selects the lowest lc,lp,pb settings - I just placed a triply nested for() loop around calling LZMA and it chooses the first best as the "best".)
Class (id): lc lp pb
GameObject (1): 8 0 0
Light (108): 2 2 2
Animation (111): 8 2 2
MonoScript (115): 2 0 0
LineRenderer (120): 0 0 0
SphereCollider (135): 0 0 0
SkinnedMeshRenderer (137): 8 4 2
AssetBundle (142): 0 2 2
WindZone (182): 0 0 0
ParticleSystem (198): 0 2 3
ParticleSystemRenderer (199): 8 3 3
Camera (20): 0 2 2
Material (21): 3 0 1
SpriteRenderer (212): 0 0 0
MeshRenderer (23): 8 4 2
Texture2D (28): 8 2 3
MeshFilter (33): 8 4 1
Transform (4): 6 2 2
Mesh (43): 0 0 1
MeshCollider (64): 1 4 1
BoxCollider (65): 7 4 2
AnimationClip (74): 0 2 2
AudioSource (82): 0 0 0
AudioClip (83): 8 0 0
Avatar (90): 2 0 2
AnimatorController (91): 2 0 2
? (95): 7 4 1
TrailRenderer (96): 0 0 0