Over 100 MB difference between zip-file and installer?

[Peek]

I was just downloading the game, after a long break, and I noticed that the windows installer is more than 100 Mb smaller than the zip-file.

Why this difference in size?

Edited October 28, 2014 by Peek

[ratchet freak]

because the windows installer probably downloads several assets during installation and doesn't need to include the linux specific stuff

[vexx32]

Depending on the exact compression method used for the installer (my knowledge in that area is outdated, but I vaguely recall that many installers use Gzip or perhaps 7zip compression algorithms), the file sizes may vary greatly between a manually packaged archive and an installer archive created by a third-party utility. As an example, a brief Google search turned up this utility, which has some pretty impressive-looking compression ratios.

[ratchet freak]

a targeted compressor can indeed make some impressive optimizations over a default general purpose simply because it has knowledge of the domain, the windows installer could for example use a compressor geared towards .net dlls and .exe for those files (and package a decompresser to use while installing), and a general algorithm for other things (models and textures)

I can point to the pack200 scheme that can use knowledge of the java jar format to efficiently compress jars by (amongst others things) extracting the static string pool of each class into a communal pool

[Peek]

Good, then I know I'm not missing some mysterious part, if I'm using the installer.

Thanks a lot for your answers, folks!