This is why the Galileo API is the way it is. It stops you from needing thousands of calls for thousands of sprites. That's also why I dropped the old API altogether. It's really not how OpenGL or D3D or any modern rendering technology works, and it shows.But we will always be slower than dedicated 3D engines. They will always have specific functions built in, which the engine can be optimized for at the cost of flexibility. I'm more content to lose a little performance be be generally useful
edit: A deflate bomb is possible: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/51071/zlib-deflate-decompression-bomb
Since minisphere reports as Sphere 2.0 now, we can definitely make an .spk2 format. I think we'd have to standardize on an archive format though. Zip seems the best option, as it can be supported easily enough with just zlib, regardless of what minisphere ends up using to support it. Plus it seems to be what most compressed formats go with. OpenDocument and Office 2007+ docx files are just relabeled zips, for example.7z would of course compress better, but would hinder performance as decompression can be slow, especially if solid compression is used. Ideally I'd want a format with decent compression but without sacrificing too much random access performance. A non-solid deflate-based format like zip fits the bill, I'd think.