What gets bundled in the compiled program?

[SSH]

Maybe someone should take a selection of large games from the download pages, try them with bzip2, tar/gzip, zip, rar, ace, etc. and compile some statistics of the results. But I've got better things to do with my time.... AOTS is available in zip or rar, btw 

[Ieremiou]

Personally I have many of the different archiver tools because One of them will be smaller than another. Also, I look for newer and better compression archivers. Recently I picked up a fairly good archiver called www.winrk.com (WinRK) which for PDFs at least can decrease the size by 20%. For instance, I took a 15 mb PDF and it shrank to about 12 mbs. As a side note the PDF was originally a 44 mb monster which i stripped using a program called PDF Enhancer. Although I did test WinRK on this bloated monster it it shrank to about 15mbs.. heh.. now that's compression.

Basically I have WinRAR, WinZIP, 7-ZIP, WinRK, and WinACE as archiver Utilities. Each one has an advantage then another depending on what you're compressing. Also some support SFX Compression. WinRAR, WinZIP, 7-ZIP, and WinACE support them now... WinRK is working on it since he's fairly new on the scene.

AlsoÃ,  some of these support the creation of other archives like bzip2, tar, gz, zip. These tools I've seen that support that are 7-zip, and WinRK for now.Ã,  The guy of WinRK is basically working on what 7-Zip has become with I assumeÃ,  a completely different algorithym.  Also with a completely different GUI where 7-Zip is like a desktop explorer.

There are also other Archiving Tools that are commandline versions that work in WinXP which tend to have a better compression then GUIs. But I don't personally like using the commandline anymore unless I'm emulating MS-DOS with DOSBox to play an old game of mine.

So test what you get with a variety of Archivers and you may find one that works better.

Also there are Compact Utilities for .EXEs out like PE Compact (Student/Freeware) which basically compressions the data inside a EXE but this can be risky because sometimes the Compacting strips important data but PE Compact has a automatic (or you can turn it off in the settings) back up so that if the output from compressing your EXE, DLL, OCX *and I think a few others* becomes corrupt you have an automatic backup.

Gosh, the utilities these days.

Edit:

Here is a link to a basically a benchmark/test site for many of the Archivers out (keeps fairly updated too). www.maximumcompression.com

[SSH]

Obviously, I didn't have anything better to do, so here's some results I got from compressing AGS games:

The games:
Buccaneer, 6DA, RodeQuest 2, Purity of the Surf, Larry Vales 2, Perm. Daylight, Odys. Kent, Astranded, Beyond Reality, RLBAT, WWTLF, The Case, Spellbound, Byzantine, J Stickman, Bestowers of Eternity, Grr Bearly Sane, Songo, 5 days a starnger, Time Out and Cirque de Zale...

Total uncompressed size 239Mb

In order of best compression

SBC (command-line) took 10 minutes to compress to 67 066 634 bytes
7zip took 11 minmutes to compress to 69 144 393 bytes (3% bigger)
WinRK took 1 hour 16 minutes (!) to compress to 69 531 834 bytes (4% bigger)
WinRAR took 4 minutes to compress to 73 352 704 bytes (9% bigger)
WinZip took 4 minutes to compress to 82 817 830 bytes (23% bigger)

This is on a 600Mhz pentium III

Since 7zip can also make self-extractors, it looks like the best to me, all round in terms of ease-of-use, time to compress and archive size.

I also tried downloading durilca and paqar which supposedly have better compression ratios yet, but they both need you to experiment with their millions of options and I couldn't be bothered.