Turning a Folder Into a Single File Without Zipping it?

Question

So my goal here is to created a self contained file that would include all the assets to load into a 3D scene. For instance there would be one text file detailing all the positions, rotations, scales, etc. of models and then folders with models and textures inside there. This wouldn't be hard to do in a folder, but for simplicity I want to have it all into one file, avoiding compressing it and uncompressing it. The reason why I don't want to compress and decompress it is to speed up loading times, because this is for a game.

Is there any possible way to do this? Or am I going to have to bite the bullet and make it into a zip.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use ZIP without compression or TAR. But here's a better idea: compress it. CPU time is cheap. Disk transfers take forever. Most of the time, loading compressed data and decompressing it is faster than loading uncompressed data.