Horde3D

7zip is a new archiving utility that competes with well known WinZIP, WinRAR and PowerArchiver.
It gives at least 30% better compression ratio than zip, rar, cab, ace and other formats and provides high extraction performance !
It supports a wide verity of formats and uses lzma, bzip, zip and ... algorithms to compress files.
7zip provides the ability to split compressed files, using strong AES 256bit encryption, making advanced SFX and a wide range of compression options such as solid archiving, high compression levels and multithread support.

In my opinion it's more reasonable to someone devote a few minutes to compress Horde3D SDK, Terrain extension and other tools with 7zip's High compression ratio format using LZMA algorithm with Ultimate compression level to "Don't waste hundreds of users times to download Horde3D tools with their low speed connections"

I use 56K connections and every 1MB takes ~5 minutes to download.
I think it's better to download 7zip archiver from 7zip.org (It's 960KB) and don't waste my time to download unreasonable huge file sizes because of their low compression zip or sfx formats.

Horde3D SDK.zip ~ 3.5 MB ~ 20 minutes to download
Horde3D SDK.7z ~ 2.2 MB ~ 10 minutes to download

I'm sure that you fell in love with 7zip in first clicks

It could be reasonable to offer 7zip (or tar.bz2) formats in addition to the standard zip formats, but unfortunately, 7zip is a pain on some platforms, and not everyone has it installed by default, so it would not be wise to replace the zip downloads.

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

Then putting files in both formats (7zip and zip) will solve the compatibility and huge file sizes problem once forever

If there is some problems with limited space on the website, we can use zSHARE.net to upload files there and put the given links in the forum

I'd clearly vote for downloads on sf.net, in both .zip and .7z. Don't use any other file hoster (other than maybe the official Horde3D server, but even for this I'd prefer sf.net to have everything in one single place).

Funnily, the very first Horde release was using 7zip. But then people complained about compatibility and we changed the format to zip. The Horde SDK is already so small and honestly having different versions with 3 and 2 MBs is a bit odd in times of broadband internet connections being the standard.

Siavash, you are a rather rare exception with your connection. Having several archives is more work for us and also more confusing for people who download. There is not a new release of Horde every week, so I think it should be acceptable to have 5 mins of longer download times. Sorry for that.

When you are on a slow connection, a better method is to obtain horde from SVN. That way when you upgrade to a newer version, SVN will download only the changed files.

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

If I'm the only 56K exception and other users are using high speed ADSL and Satellite connections, just forget about it