Unity's new data compression team aims to put the squeeze on your assets

If you're a Unity developer you might appreciate today's blog post from Unity principal engineer (and occasional Gamasutra blogger) Rich Geldreich detailing how the company's new data compression team aims to slim down your game's assets.

One of the new team's main goals is to evaluate Unity as a whole and figure out how to improve its compression systems so that textures, animations, sounds and other assets suck up less memory, which seems particularly notable for Unity devs predominantly making games for memory-starved mobile devices.

"On the practical front, we’ve developed and started analyzing our first mobile-friendly binary delta compression (or file 'patching') library," reads an excerpt of Geldreich's post.

"While doing this work, we realized the key long-term problem the Compression Team should be working on: How do we build a data compression engine that Unity can talk to better? Our long term goal is to build several new lossy and lossless compression engines optimized specifically for Unity’s data."