You really should heed the advice of your newsreader (see the line above).
>The compression in ZIP is shithouse.
What wonderful command of language! Your vocabulary dazzles us all.
NOT! Really, this newsgroup is a place where educated adults carry on
a generally civilzed discussion. Please don't ruin it by speaking like
a juvenile delinquent.
>its practically non-existant, and i
>feel it needs to be replaced with something better. Obviously such
>techniques as LZW and HUFFMAN is not worthwhile as each string is
>individually compressed, and RLE encoding will gain us nothing.
Since you're talking about compressing each string individually, I assume
you want a scheme where the text is held compressed in RAM until
it's actually printed out, right?
The problem is that compression and decompression are rather CPU
intensive. People are already complaining that the newer works of IF
are too slow. Adding compression would slow them down even more.
Of course, if you have a reasonably fast computer, that's not a problem.
But reasonably fast computers also tend to have reasonably much memory,
don't they, and in that case you don't need to compress text to
save RAM. Where you really want to save RAM, you generally don't
have very much CPU power either.
On the other hand, if you want to save *disk* space, or to reduce
bandwidth when downloading games, then you can use Lempel-Ziv and
Huffman encoding. You could gzip all the files and gunzip them before
playing. Or you could write a fancy Zip interpreter that recognizes
gzipped files and unzips them when loading them (again, at a cost in
CPU time).
Honestly, I've never seen the size of the game files as a problem, but
then I don't run them on a Psion Organizer or a C64. What I *do* see
as a possible problem is that the interpreters may not be fast enough,
but adding compression will only aggravate that problem.
Magnus