Wheels 3 Development diary - The problem with the size

Hi,

This is the first part of the development diary. It'll give you some information on how I try to keep the size of the download package as small as possible and why I am doing this. So, why needs the download to be as small as possible? One reason is that a smaller download size cuts down the download/upload time. Another thing is that I try to make the game Xbox360 compatible and the Xbox360 has a size limit of 150 MB. So for the Xbox360 version the file limit is set to 150 MB. Currently I try to make the Xbox360 version also work on Windows. There is currently no difference between these two and my goal is to keep it like this until release. Currently my whole solution with backups is about 800 MB and the game Content itself is about 490 MB. A nightly build is currently 108 MB big. So, how do I get it that small? The solution is very easy: I compress the Content folder. The Content archive is 106 MB is big. Simple zip compression, but it does the trick. The performance? It takes only a few seconds to decompress the archive and it's only decompressed on startup. That's a nice solution!

-Christian