Hacker News Reader

> More like the complete version happens to be 50 GB larger than the shipped on-disc data, judging from the 96 GB install size

Compressed distributions that are expanded for install have been used at least since floppies were the main distribution media for isn't all to fixed disks.

Distribution media (and the fixed disks they install to) may be on the order of 5 orders of magnitude larger now, but that hasn't changed.

View on HN

I don't think that's as true as it once was - the majority of that 96GB is almost certainly media of some kind - images, textures, music, etc. - they don't losslessly compress well at all.

I thought disk I/O was a major blocker for loading in games, which would imply you'd want to keep things compressed on disk.

Additionally, as another commenter pointed out, the majority of assets are in formats that support native compression (textures and audio) and thus won't compress too well a 2nd time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com