You know, there is such a thing as accessibility being an issue as well.  Rar and particularly Zip are far more likely to be extractable for any given user without them having to hunt down 7z.  The majority of users on this forum (or any forum) are most often not the type of people who always have that kind of software installed.  In all honesty, I already do enough support with people for my mod(s) in regards to installation and various troubleshooting that I'm not keen on having to answer the question "how do I extract 7z?" every second post as well.

I'm not refuting the stats that 7z can do higher compression.  That's nothing but a good thing.  I'm already getting better than 60% (sometimes 90% depending on the content) compression ratios with good old almost universally supported Zip though.  At this point, I don't feel the additional gains in compression, as nice as they might be, are worth the extra hassle switching would bring.

-dolynick

Extra hassle would be PAQ or BALZ.

So much stuff is already being distributed as 7-Zip - including official patches for some games - I really don't think it counts as that anymore.

I think the reason people demand zip files because they didn't associate winzip with 7z. That is why the software doesn't reconigze it. To make the program reconigze it you have to change the settings and it should be under File Associations.

I have IzArc so it doesn't really matter.

The "Program Files" directory stays he same except its "Program Files (x86)" for Vista64 owners.

The mod dir is "<DRIVE_LETTER>:\Users\<USER>\AppData\Local\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\"

Yes, there are a few notable exceptions to the bandwidth-wasting trend

For my huge project, the Last Stand, which will likely be at least 200Mb in size, I am looking into making a self-installer, just to avoid the installation support. I will do my best to use the highest possible compression method however.

But yeah, 7zip isn't so widely used as rar or zip, so that's the reason most people choose to pack their mods using these two.

I think that the gz might be based on the zip compression methods

harpo

Ok if most people use it now, i give it a try.

But now I have another problem, finding a new filehoster. Why? I read my article:

http://tohklidan.impulsedriven.net/article/344382/FileFrontcom_closes_its_doors

Tar is just an archive, it doesn't compress. In linux you tar the files up, and then compress the tar as .Z .gz .bz2 or .lzma

.Z is a lageacy gnu zip format, you don't see many of them around. gzip is a cousing of winzip when it comes to algorythm, and achieves similar performance. BZip2 has been the defacto standard in linux high-compression for years. Its about at RAR levels.

LZMA is what many distributions are using now for package compression. Its 7-Zip's compression algorythm with the 7z archive format (which doesnt support unix permissions) ripped out. Or vice-versa, depending on point of view.

Like someone else said, I see far more 7z than I see Rars these days, except for warez.

As far as the installer, 7zip's SFX is, like all SFX, not really suited to that stuff. Happily NSIS can do pretty much anything under the sun, installer-wise.

In fact, one of NSIS' compression algo's - lzma-solid - is the equivalent of the .lzma files used in linux, aka 7-Zip's compressor right from the SDK. If you wanna ssqueeze every last meg, however, there's Nsis7z, which is an extractor plugin built from the recent 7Zip SDKs that lets you use 7z archives made with x64 7-Zip at custom (read: insane) settings.

Thx Soor

7z is part of my post-format installs as well, never had any issue with it.

It's also worth noting that 7zip has the benefit of being opensource/freeware. The free versions of winrar and winzip were both time-limited or nagware last I checked.

So does PeaZip, which also does some truly obscure compression methods