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When I first started PBEM games (many years ago! It was pretty standard practice to zip game files, partly to reduce file size in the days before broadband, but also to prevent files from becoming corrupted. More recently zipping seems to have fallen out of favour and I too had stopped doing it. 

Obviously file size is not really and issue with highspeed internet connections, however, recently I have had several games "go bad" because of a corrupt file. This has been on two different laptops, one with win 8 and one with win10 so it isnt an OS problem or machine specific. I have decided to go back to zipping files from now on.

I am using a nice free zip program called PeaZip (available from this link)
Better than the zip program that comes with windows, and very similar in appearance and operation to Winzip But whereas Winzip now costs £30!!!! (I couldnt quite believe how much this utility has gone up in price since I first bought it!!!) PeaZip is free.

I Would be interested in other peoples views, 

..anyone any thoughts on Zipping, or not Zipping?

Personally I do not believe zipping affects it in the slightest. The BTE files are already binary files to begin with, so I cannot think of any technical reason why zipping would help (except for compression which no longer matters just like you said).

Not sure why, but my RV all the sudden needs zipped file from (2) other players now. Happened about 3/4 of the way
into one game.

What is screwy is that I don't have to zip anything for them......

Zipping for SB game files does not have a great compression savings as already mentioned here. However, there are many other games supported on the blitz which do benefit significantly from the file size change. Especially if your are playing a 100+ turn campaign game.

Dog Soldier

(09-20-2015, 12:03 PM)Richie61 Wrote: [ -> ]Not sure why, but my RV all the sudden needs zipped file from (2) other players now. Happened about 3/4 of the way
into one game.

What is screwy is that I don't have to zip anything for them......

Hi, Ed
Thats an interesting point, I have a feeling that this problem has only occurred with particular opponents in my case too, cant remember who else I was playing with. 

Its just happened in my game with Landser, rather frustrating when we were 75% of the way through the game, more so because it was the tournament! 

(He was whupping me anyway so I wasn't too disappointed to finish it  ) 

It's always been a bit of a mystery in terms of zipped files being less apt to corrupt.   Don't know if there's anything real to it, or if it was simply something started years ago and just passed on.  I still do it on occasion, lately I've been lazy...