The new BRS format has quite a few benefits, below are a few of the major improvements!
> TINY HD FOOTPRINT
The new .BRS files are absolutely tiny in comparison to the older .BRD's and should not require any external compression (WinZip, WinRar, etc). That said, if you do want to give the .BRS a bit of an extra squeeze, you can get the file size even smaller through zipping the .BRS.
> PERSISTENT MULTIPLAYER
Perhaps most importantly having the new super compressed format makes having permanently running servers actually plausible.
> SAVE AND LOAD LARGER SHIPS
Ships that ended up too big for W71 will be able to load again, with the below shot of Stuff Plus's WIP Great Lift an example of an entity which was getting too large for poor old W71.0c to handle. Thanks to the BRS conversion it fires it up with no difficulty at all!
> ACCELERATED SAVING AND LOADING!
Combined with the new .BRS format, Zack has also dramatically increased the speed at which very large entities will save and load, making auto-save a little more viable, and loading a huge ship with lots of empty space much faster.
> EVERY TIME YOU MAKE A SAVE, A BACKUP GETS ITS WINGS
In the latest version an auto-backup is in place so that every time you save changes to a ship a backup is made inside the backup folder. Meaning if the game happens to crash for some reason and the ship gets corrupted (Hey, it's all still in Alpha!), you should have a backup available.
