Posted January 11, 2015
Rixasha: Another thing I noticed; the Linux version tarball is 25% bigger than the Windows installer files combined, because .gz uses a compression algorithm from 1977. For this data, just using .xz instead of .gz with just the default options made the file size fairly comparable.
There may be parameters I didn't consider, such as speed of compression, memory use during decompression, or the cost of documentation. I'm fairly sure xz is supported by the target distros, though.
tarballs also have to contain libraries that are needed by the game, where the .deb installation files only need to contain the game and a list of the dependencies in order for apt to satisfy them. so that is another reason for their greater size.There may be parameters I didn't consider, such as speed of compression, memory use during decompression, or the cost of documentation. I'm fairly sure xz is supported by the target distros, though.