CompactGUI

> This feels wrong. In that, I'd be surprised if they are not using compression. Check this out, you can sort by the number of submissions to filter out indie games https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14CVXd6PTIYE9XlNpRsxJ... from https://github.com/IridiumIO/CompactGUI

> This claim needs some real world evidence to back it up (and usually it's not about a performance impact, but instead a perceived image quality impact). We're talking lossless compression here, so image quality is not the issue. Fortunately someone else has already done this research. There's a tool for Windows to control the compact.exe behavior for individual folders called CompactGUI: https://github.com/IridiumIO/CompactGUI They maintain a database of compression results here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14CVXd6PTIYE9XlNpRsxJ... Reductions in storage use of greater than 50% are so common that they're hardly even worth remarking on. My experience with compressing a bunch of games is that the biggest gains come from compressing bloated asset packs. Hard to know what else could be taking up more than 50% of the storage space

Yes it can be compressed (I just tried simple /usr/bin/zip w/o flags on a 10 MB PDF with results of ~10% file saving), but then it has to be uncompressed before usage. Its better to use some kind of transparent mechanic from within the OS (e.g. filesystem or compact.exe/CompactGUI [1]). [1] https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

I looked a while ago to find alternatives when some of these issues came up a while ago but I haven't found any other viable alternatives. I thought PeaZip might be a good option until finding out that it is also based on 7-Zip. The one tool that I did find useful during this search though is https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI. Apparently in Win10, Microsoft introduced a compact.exe commandline tool that transparently compresses files/folders. The above tool is a GUI for it. It's not a replacement for a proper archiver but it's a nice tool to compress things like games and other large programs that need to stay in place.