That's quite clever!
> Since we compress once and decompress many times on player machines, we can afford slow compression times. Zstd lets you tune the compression level, and we found that level 19 yielded about 13% better compression than zip.
Zstd is parallelizable across threads, which wasn't mentioned here. It helps speed it up at high compression levels, though not as much as I'd like.
> binary data to connected clients in tiny messages, each saying “field 5 on object X is now 123”
I wonder how Meta's newer, format-understanding OpenZL would do. I imagine its schemas could be auto-generated from protobuf.
These are optimized for compiled code though.