Auto opening from a zip/rar/7z/tar.gz etc.

[Chris]

You should be able to auto open a stykz file from a zip/rar/7z bla bla bla without having to extract the files.

Now you're probably saying "HAR HAR HAR CHRIS MESSED UP!! WHAT IF THERE ARE MORE THEN ONE STYKZ FILES IN THE ZIPED FILE?!?"

There could be something like File>Import>Styk or File>Import>Zip>Stykz File/Styk File. Then a browse button to locate the zip/bla then when you double click it, a menu should appear with all the stykz/styk files inside.

This would make it so you don't need to have 3'rd party programs on the persons computer that's trying to open a stykz file.

[Hoboapple]

HA! You messed up! What if someone zipped up multiple stykz files? what would you do then? Huh? Huh?!

Can other programs do this?

[Chris]

HA! You messed up! What if someone zipped up multiple stykz files? what would you do then? Huh? Huh?!

Can other programs do this?

Yes, and it's very helpful.

[scykei]

What if there are other files in them?

I was thinking if Stykz can automatically save it's STYKZ file compressed, and open it decompressed. I think Pivot does that and that explains why a STYKZ file is usually more than 1000% bigger than a PIV file.

The only reason we compress a STYKZ file is because if its inconvenient size. If it were to be smaller, there wouldn't be any real need for that.

[Hoboapple]

What if there are other files in them?

I was thinking if Stykz can automatically save it's STYKZ file compressed, and open it decompressed. I think Pivot does that and that explains why a STYKZ file is usually more than 1000% bigger than a PIV file.

The only reason we compress a STYKZ file is because if its inconvenient size. If it were to be smaller, there wouldn't be any real need for that.

This guy know's what he's talking about.

Do you mean leik zip, or just different format?

[stykzman]

What if there are other files in them?

I was thinking if Stykz can automatically save it's STYKZ file compressed, and open it decompressed. I think Pivot does that and that explains why a STYKZ file is usually more than 1000% bigger than a PIV file.

The only reason we compress a STYKZ file is because if its inconvenient size. If it were to be smaller, there wouldn't be any real need for that.

This guy know's what he's talking about.

Do you mean leik zip, or just different format?

<techTalk>

Well, Pivot used zLib , a lossless data compression library that is used by a variety of apps and is included in the OS X builds. Peter picked it because (AFAICT) there were existing zLib libraries for Delphi. But originally he only used it for the .piv files and left the .stk files "raw". When he worked on Piv 3, the .stk files were also compressed with zLib; I'm assuming because they could contain sprites. This is also the reason why Stykz can only import Piv 2 .stk files - zLib support hasn't been added to Stykz yet.

</techTalk>

One thing to keep in mind is that if Stykz were to keep the .stykz files in a compressed format, then it would mean a delay in opening a .stykz file sine it would need to be decompressed before opening. Not that I'm against it, but just saying...

[Hoboapple]

Didn't you have some other plan for shrinking the file size, anyway?

[stykzman]

Yes... right now the actual graphic objects for each frame are being stored with the document, so when you go to a frame I can quickly just "jump" there and the only thing I need to draw on the fly are the nodes in the right state. But my plan was instead to store the *definitions* of the objects instead of the objects themselves, and then store these definitions in a compressed state, so it may take a few more milliseconds to draw a frame, but it should be much "lighter".