Rad introduces high-speed Mermaid and Selkie compressors in Oodle 2.3.0

Rad Game Tools has added two new data compressors to its latest Oodle library update.

Mermaid and Selkie are descended from the older Kraken tool, but are said to be much faster in operation, with lower compression – Mermaid alone is said to be approximately twice as fast as Kraken, with Zlib-level compression.

“Mermaid and Selkie make huge strides in what’s possible in compression in the high-speed domain, the same way that Kraken did in the high-compression domain,” explained Oodle dev Charles Bloom in a lengthy blog post detailing the new technology.

“Kraken, Mermaid, and Selkie all use an architecture that makes space-speed decisions in the encoder to give the best trade-off of compressed size versus decoding speed.

“The three compressors have different performance targets and make decisions suited for each one’s usage domain; Kraken favours more compression and will give up some speed, Selkie strongly favours speed, Mermaid is in between.”