Game resources can soon grow very large in size, so it would be great if we could somehow compress these files so that they take up less space in our installation package, particularly if there are any restrictions on the maximum size an install package can have.
Marmalade provides just such a feature in the form of Derbh archives, which is very similar to compression systems such as ZIP that you will no doubt be familiar with. Derbh supports multiple compression algorithms, including the standard LZMA and also its own proprietary algorithm, which can achieve improved compression by operating over multiple files simultaneously.
The Marmalade SDK provides an API which allows us to load compressed files as easily as if they were provided as individual uncompressed files. A command-line utility called DZip is also provided to generate the archives in the first place.