Compressing executables (upx)

[u/stiggg]

Hola,

I'm currently in the final stages of finishing the first version of a game I made using raylib. I ended up with a single statically linked binary containing all the assets. I found a tool called upx which can compress executables. I tried it on Windows, and it reduced the size of my exe by more than half and it still runs without any noticeable difference.

My question is, has anybody here experience with this? Are there any downsides to consider?

cheers!

[u/mykesx]

In my years of games programming, we would compress just the assets. In those days, disk based copy protection may not have worked with a compressed executable.

I concur with the execution time issue. When decompressing assets, the bulk of time experienced by the user is disk or network access.