Horde3D

Is there a simple way to precompile shaders instead of shipping .shader files with readable source with the executable?

Also, is there a suggested C++ container format to throw all ressource files into so I don't have to ship thousands of small files? Maybe just an uncompressed zlib wrapper used for streaming is a good idea, but I am not sure how well that would work.

GLSL simply doesn't support precompiled shaders

For file storage, we LZMA compress each file individually, then append them all together into a big binary blob with a table-of-contents (name to offset look-up table) at the start.

Okay then, maybe I''ll just hardcode some checksum stuff into my code to make sure the users don't use modified shaders.

After careful selection, I just decided for PhysFS (http://icculus.org/physfs/), which seems pretty decent and can use 7zip (amongst a lot of others) as you suggested. Thank you for your help!

I've been sticking my shaders (and most other resources) into an SQLite database. Pretty easy to use and there's a great C++ oriented wrapper for the C api on code project. However, I was already using SQLite for paging and alife so it made sense in my situation.