Introduction
Are you someone who helped crowdfund Firmament through Kickstarter or Fangamer at the Limited Edition Box level or above? Would you like to have a DVD or Blu-Ray copy of the game as part of your physical box? Then this is the project for you!
Before we get into the details, I want to make it clear I am a big Cyan fan. I think the game studio and its employees and contractors are good people who are good at what they do, and I understand why they chose not to include a physical disk with their physical box. At the same time, I am still disappointed a physical disk wasn't included because I place more value in having a physical version of the game as opposed to not. This project is neither meant to defame nor inflame, but to fill a gap.
There are two parts to this project: compression and a label. The former is only necessary if you wish to fit the installer on a single DVD±R DL (DVD±R9) disk. That's a dual layer DVD. If you are using a Blu-Ray disk, compression isn't necessary.
Questions? Comments? Suggestions? You can find me on Reddit and Discord. I unashamedly adore receiving praise, so please send a "thank you" if you find this project useful.
Other tools I've made are listed here.
This project is released under the MIT License. Firmament and Cyan are trademarks of Cyan, Inc. © Cyan, Inc. All rights reserved.
Compression
Compressing your installer is straightforward but a bit lengthy. For reference, I'm using an Intel Core i5-9400 CPU with 32 GB of RAM, and compression took about 1.5 hours, while decompression from the DVD took about 20 minutes. Add disk burning time to that.
Please note: I highly recommend running this tool only on the official offline GOG installer. This project does not generate a custom installer, and the official one will ensure you end up with all the correct dependencies.
Instructions
  1. Download the compression software: firmament_compressor.zip (18.6 MB)
  2. Open README.txt and follow the instructions to create a compressed archive.
  3. Write the contents of the "burn" folder to DVD.
  4. To get your original installer back, just insert your DVD and run "decompress.bat".
Explanation
There are three steps to this whole process: precompression, deduplication, and compression.
Precompression is done by XTool. It decompresses anything it can in the hope that we can compress those parts better in a later step. This will result in an archive about twice as large as your original installer.
Deduplication is the job of SREP. It finds and removes redundant data. This reduces the size of the precompressed archive by about 25%.
Compression is performed by 7-zip and is exactly what you're accustomed to: A compression algorithm (LZMA2 in this case) is used to reduce the size of the deduplicated archive as much as possible, resulting in an archive about 60% smaller than the original.
Label
These images have a resolution of 300 DPI based on a label diameter of 4.6562 in (11.826748 cm) with a bleed of 0.0625 in (0.15875 cm). Artwork will look great with either a small or large hole in the center. Right-click an image to save.
DVD
Blu-Ray