LZMA (7zip) should be used for data package: 150MB smaller

[tundramagi]

Load times in nexuiz are pretty long as is, it would be uncool if they were longer. There has been alot of work by divverent to cut down load times (particularly on the server) and this idea of using a dog-slow compression scheme to gain a one time advantage and a persistant curse would nullify all that work (not loading light maps on server, capping bot waypoint load times, and caching bot waypoints once loaded etc).

On all my machines, no matter how fast, loading nexuiz maps is SLOW (but faster than last release by far). Other games (like urbanterror) load pretty fast in comparison. We need faster load times, not slower!

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[mand1nga]

When using bots in Nexuiz 2.5 the startup times are rather long on some open maps like silvercity. This has been improved already by caching "walkable" bot paths (using plain text files). This will be available on the next release.

[Ed]

+1 to everything Div said. LZMA = more CPU, more RAM to decompress. The more brutal you are at compressing it, the longer and more costly it is to decompress. This is not how ZIP works where the longer you take compressing it, in general the longer you take compressing, the quicker it is decompressing.

[Asraniel]

why isn't just the download package ziped with lzma?

[alpha]

why isn't just the download package ziped with lzma?

/me seconds this question.

[TVR]

Windows and OSX do not support .7z natively, and not everyone uses 7zip.

Zip is a well-defined standard, stick with it.

[Psychcf]

Windows and OSX do not support .7z natively, and not everyone uses 7zip.

Zip is a well-defined standard, stick with it.

err, what about .tar.gz? it offers pretty good compression, and it's a bit more common... Also, why not offer both formats?

[uluyol901]

Windows and OSX do not support .7z natively, and not everyone uses 7zip.

Zip is a well-defined standard, stick with it.

err, what about .tar.gz? it offers pretty good compression, and it's a bit more common... Also, why not offer both formats?

A gzipped tarball won't work since you can't access certain files in it without unzipping the whole thing, but you *could* gzip everything first then make a .tar, but that will have about the same speed as zip.

Nexuiz already ships with many external libs for mac and windows, so it won't be a problem.
I would like to know the speed of compressing the contents with lzma, and then putting them in a tarball vs zip vs 7z, also going beyond -2 lzma compression isn't supposed to make a large difference in size, but will make a large difference in decompression time.

[divVerent]

Guess why I tried -1 lzma compression above. Not much faster either.

[Alien]

7z is not a new compression method but more like a container.

So it seems the bottleneck is hdd reading speed and zip has the best decompression time/file size ratio.