Boiled 2.2 - Reduce size of WoW (or steam) for SSD optimization

[Igzz]

Full credits to Synthaxx of MMO-Champion for developing this tool. I am just sharing it with you guys. (He's a moderator there, I didn't bother providing a virus scan, feel free to provide one if you wish).
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Good afternoon all!
After much work, i'm pleased to announce that Boiled 2.2 is now available! This release marks both the changeover of the UI, and the introduction of a brand new feature - WoW Automatic Optimization! As Boiled 2.0 was rather popular when that was announced, i felt that since this is a WoW-focused site, such an addition would be of value to many of you.

This feature allows you to minimize the size of your WoW installation to a size of your choosing, while maintaining much of the performance associated with installing it on an SSD. It takes only 3 simple steps to optimize it. I've designed it so that it always rounds down. By this, it means that when it copies the files to the migration directory, it will check your desired size and copy enough files to bring your installation size equal to or lower than that value.

What's more, if you decide you want to optimize it further, you can do that. By design, it has to restore the already-optimized files first, but it'll then proceed to optimize your installation to your new size. You can only optimize downward. You can't increase the size of your installation without restoring it to default first (which can be done in a single click) and then optimizing down from there. This is a technical limitation and not one that can be solved easily.

It's an immensely complicated feature but i've made it simple enough to use for almost anyone out there. I believe i'm the only one who's managed to create an optimizer for WoW so far, but even if not, it makes Boiled valuable to even more people.



As you can also see, the UI has been updated. Back in Boiled 2.0, we had a list of items that had bold text to indicate they'd been moved to a different directory/"had been boiled". With 2.1, this design was updated and further clarified which games were located inside the Steam directory and which weren't. The problem with the design in 2.1 is that it simply said "SSD". What if you hadn't installed Steam on an SSD? It served it's purpose, but it felt like it might confused people.

Thanks to updates to my development tools, i solved this problem and decided to go with a Metro-esque theme. The large center icons represent game status; ticks represent items located in the Steam directory, and the crosses mark items that have been moved elsewhere.



Also note that if Steam is detected but WoW isn't, the WoW tab will be unavailable, and vice versa. If neither is detected, then Boiled will close. If both are detected, obviously both tabs will be available.

Please also note that as of 2.2, the configuration format has changed. Your existing config won't work, but will be migrated over automatically on the first start (assuming you drop it over the top of your existing Boiled executable instead of running it from a different folder).

With all of this in mind, i am considering expanding the WoW Optimization feature to more games, though there's a lot of technical considerations to be made. Each game would need to have it's "optimization list" added manually, and it requires that i can actually detect the game's installation (usually done via registry), and more importantly, that i have access to the game (i have many, but there'll always be someone who wants me to sink £40 into a game i'll never play just to provide this feature to them -- that's not happening). If you've got a game in mind you'd like to see optimization provided for, and the above are all true/possible, then i'll look into it (standard "no promises" though).

As always, you can get Boiled over on my download page; ThoughtCloud - Connecting Inspiration :: Projects and also, as always, it's completely free.

Comments, feedback, and bug reports can be left here as always.

[Neo_mat]

symlink does the same...

[Ninjaderp]

Thanks for sharing it here, wouldnt have known about it otherwise!

symlink does the same...

So what?

[Neo_mat]

Thanks for sharing it here, wouldnt have known about it otherwise!

So what?

So how is it an "optimizer"?

[Thidan]

Thid doesn't seem to detect my WoW installation at all, have it on my HDD instead of my SSD (Due to filesize) and it simply won't find it, nor my Steam installation (Also on the HDD)

[akspa420]

So, I take it that you're basically creating junctions and symlinks for the most heavily accessed data files? It may make sense to store the wow cache files on an ssd, so the game doesn't have to wait on the access time of conventional hard drive tech. If you have a ton of RAM, though, it may make sense to create a ram disk to store those files, for the best performance.

I'd actually like to suggest a feature that allows WoW cache files to run out of a ram disk. There's a few decent free ram disk libraries out there that will work with x86 & x64 platforms that you can utilize somewhat easily. IMdisk comes to mind, since it's quite easy to script with (full command-line options, open source) - Tools and utilities for Windows

[Vengfull]

to be honest i like this, It works fine for me and if it wasnt for this post i wouldnt have found WinFlare so i love it and the repo link :P +Rep