RE: [GD-General] Building pak/zip files

[Brian S. <bs...@mi...>]

Things like WinZip will (by default) try to compress everything, so you
would want to set command line flags to disable compression for
uncompressible things like sound files.

And I can't imagine a zip implementation that wouldn't add files to the
end of the zip in the order that you insert them, because the
alternative (shifting files down) would be so inefficient. =20

But the worst part of zip files is that the catalog lives at an
unspecified distance from the end of the file, so opening an archive
means seeking to somewhere near the end and walking around looking for
the catalog.  If you're really worried about speed, you probably want to
have a post-process step where you generate another copy of that catalog
in a spot where it can be loaded quickly...like placed on the DVD, right
in front of the zip archive.

--brian

-----Original Message-----
From: Thatcher Ulrich [mailto:tu...@tu...]=20
Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2001 6:21 AM
To: Tom Spilman
Cc: gam...@li...
Subject: Re: [GD-General] Building pak/zip files

On Dec 05, 2001 at 05:41 -0600, Tom Spilman wrote:
> > Zip file tools don't generally give you control over what
> > gets compressed and what doesn't(I think).
>=20
>     Actually i don't think this is necessarily true

It doesn't actually matter -- zip tools generally will choose the best
method of compression for each file, so .jpg's or .mpg's will be
stored uncompressed.

> nor that you cannot
> specify the order of the contents of the zip file.  Check out
> http://www.winzip.com/wzcline.htm which adds command line support to
WinZip.

Infozip's command-line zip apparently stores things in the order you
specify.  Also, it's open source under a X-style license, so you can
hack stuff in or incorporate the code in your project.  There's also
zlib from the same project, designed for embedding.  We use zlib at
Oddworld for unpacking resource files.

http://www.info-zip.org/
http://www.gzip.org/zlib/

--=20
Thatcher Ulrich <tu...@tu...>
http://tulrich.com

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