I beleive you're talking about two differnet compression needs. ZIP compresses
text files and encodes them in a way that is smaller than usual. Mesh
Compression, as I understand it, determines if a mesh has useless triangle and
removes them from the mesh, replacing them with larger triangles that fit the
job. So if a mesh was a grid of triangles that formed a flat square, it would
get replaced by two or three triangles.

More importantly, yes ZIP is a great method of making big files small, I don't
think POV-Ray can read the contents of a zip archive and use the code.

Josh
Rune wrote:

> I have some general questions about compression.
>
> I don't know much about different platforms. Is the .zip format accessible
> on all platforms? I always zip all my scene files before I upload them to my
> website, but does that exclude some people from using them?
>
> If .zip is universally supported I have a question about mesh compression:
> what is the reason for the compression used by pcm and mesh2? Zipping a mesh
> file is more efficient than using any of those formats, and a zipped regular
> mesh is even smaller than a zipped pcm or mesh2.
>
> I have two guesses myself:
> 1) Zip is not universally supported.
> 2) The file size while sending the mesh over the net is not the reason for
> compression, but rather the file size on the local HD.
>
> Ignorantly,
>
> Rune
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