Ext Protect = Miracle Worker?

the map im currently working on is very big, around 700k in size due to custom models/custom spells/etc.

I just got ext protect, and when I used it, it took over 100k off the filesize. (its 582k total now).. I was skeptical at first, thought maybe it deleted the custom stuff.. but I tested it, and everything was there.

Now I ask you, how is this possible? Zepirs only dropped a couple kilobytes off the size, and i thought *that* was good.

The protection also works great, you cant even see any of the files in winmpq.

I guess this post is more or less asking if Ext Protect is for real, and if it has any adverse effects due to the sizeable ammount of data it shaves off.

It works nice. It's not a miracle. Extrarius did a good job optimizing the space used by the files that go inside the W3M.

He might have used some of those "tricks":

1) Use a better ZLIB compression. Worldedit does not use the BEST compression allowed when adding files to the W3M.

2) Optimize the war3map.j by removing comments and unused spaces.

3) Remove some "useless" files of the W3M. For and example, the "regions" file is not needed by Warcraft, only by the worldedit. Warcraft generates the regions based on the .j script.

4) Reduce the "MPQ MAX Files" on the W3M since each entry on the MPQ takes 64 bytes. For an example let's our map has 17 files within it. This requires a MPQ MAX Files = 32 , since MPQs will only work with power of 2 numbers (2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256....)
If we sucessfully erase one file on our map (17-1=16), this will allow us to set a "MPQ MAX Files" = 16, saving both the space used by that erased file and adittional 1024 bytes (since we decreased "MPQ MAX Files" to 16 from 32, we saved 16 entries on the MPQ, 16 entries * 64 bytes = 1024 extra bytes saved)

I just want to add the he pointed out that sometimes the map shrinks in size.