Modders working on projects with new area graphics, take note! Players looking for smaller downloads, rejoice!
Per Olofsson, a friend of mine, generously spent the last week or so working on the problem of TIS area graphics: they're huge and ungainly, even packaged with RAR or the like in a mod.
The result is TISpack, a tool that applies an intelligent JPEG/ZLIB compression routine to a TIS file, making it significantly smaller than one packaged through conventional ZIP/RAR/ACE/whatever.
TISpack comes with full source, documentation of the tool and new TIZ compressed file format, and is easy to integrate into the mod installation process.
Grab it now:
http://www.pocketplane.net/tools