LZ4 in commercial application

 Time for great news. Although i've been informed of a few open-source projects or commercial application working to integrate LZ4 into their production, this is actually the first time that a company has completed a product with it. A product that you can buy by the way. Moreover, it's kind enough to tell publicly about it.

LZ4 is in-use within a video game called 1000 Tiny Claws, by Mediatonic. The company is young but certainly not new, and has already received several good mentions for some of its previous productions, namely "Who's that Flying", and "Monsters (probably) stole my princess" (i really love that title :). Therefore their new game stirs a lot of expectation. Let's wish them great success with their new sky-pirates adventures !

Within the game, LZ4 is used mostly to decompress resources. These are many sprites, background tiles, animations and graphics in "cartoon style". Resources are not limited to graphics, and some text files, profiles and models may also join the fray. But typically graphics tend to inflate memory budget quite much faster than the others.

For this use case, LZ4 can be useful thanks to its very fast decoding speed, making the decoding not just painless, but advantageous (i.e. faster !) compared to using resource in plain uncompressed mode. The decoder is also memory-less, which also helps.

The compression part of LZ4 is not used within the game, but obviously, it has been necessary to compress resources before injecting them into the game. For this use, the high compression version LZ4-HC has been put to the task. Not only does it compress 20-30% better, saving space and bandwidth, it also makes the compressed data even easier to decode. So this is all gains for this use case.

and of course, the all-important credit line...

1000TC engine is work from Gabor Dorka

Note that, at the time the game was created, LZ4-HC was GPL, but there is no problem with that, since LZ4-HC is not shipped within the game. Only the decoder is, which is BSD, and incurs no restriction.

The game is scheduled October 4th, on the PSN. Now is time to frag some monsters...