Quote: Original post by owl
Use JPEGs rather than raw files...don't scale them much.

Good advice. Again, though, take a look at S3TC. It's generally a better option than JPEGs for texture files, because there's no need to uncompress them.

Quote: Good luck with that.

Heh - you seem to have a bit of a personal issue with the JPEG format!

I have to say that you're not giving your fellow developers much credit if you assume they can't make informed decisions about what formats to use. Anyone with a reasonable understanding of computer graphics is going to be familiar with the concepts of lossy and lossless compression, and will be able to make reasonable determinations about what type of compression to use, and where.

In this particular case, I have a large number of 'thumbnail' images that are used in a menu. The images are rendered at a fairly small, fixed size. They will never be scaled up or down, so the only variable will be the screen resolution. It is these images that I'm considering storing in JPEG format.

Anyway, this has drifted off topic (especially with respect to this particular forum), so I will leave it at that.

Is 7z patent free?
Many people probably don't have it, and to maximize the ease of use for as large a userbase as possible, ZIP-files that are integrated into Windows is probably the best idea, unless one can keep the files in .7z format and load them from within the program.

Quote: Original post by Erik Rufelt
Is 7z patent free?

It's my understanding that it is (though I think the decompressor is non-free). In any case, while you shouldn't expect people to unzip a 7z file, you shouldn't expect them to unzip a zip file either. These days most people want installers. Under Windows, MSI is ideal because it avoids a small amount of executable overhead and because files can be easily extracted from it if desired.

Of course, that's only an issue for installing... if your resources are packed up, use the best compressor you can find, and 7z is great.