dark22 wrote:The game has a huge number of tiny files for its relative small total size, and they can negatively impact disk (de)fragmentation.
Can the game files be packed in larger files for the future ea builds or the release version?
It could be -- and bundling everything into a few big data files is something I've considered in the past.
That said, implementing bundling isn't trivial (the art is relatively easily bundled, the Lua script files, less so), and it would complicate development a bit. I'm also not certain that the fragmentation and disc size access issues are really likely to be significant on modern hardware and filesystems.
Can you point me to any references that measure the performance impacts of file fragmentation on, say Windows 7+? It's probably best not to start thinking seriously about these kinds of optimizations without evidence that there's a good chance of effecting measurable improvements