Game assets are packed into a single “PAK” data file, with optional compression. The game’s virtual filesystem can access files in the PAK file and has a fallback to the native filesystem. For compression I used the LZ4 library – it’s fast and easy to integrate.

The format of the PAK file is quite simple. It contains data of all the files and at the end there’s a table of contents, with filenames, offsets and lengths.

I have a simple utility app that creates the data file. There’s an option to turn off compression for faster rebuilds during development; it also gets automatically disabled for  files smaller than 1KB and for all OGG audio tracks.