It would be great they not only mount folders, but zip AND .7z files too… Huge savings of hard drive space, makes it easier to “mod manage” too.
And this brings huge saving in loading time too because instead of issuing thousands of IOCTL, you’re only issuing 1 and you get the full directory and the file bits in one go.
And since in general any VFS library is supporting .zip (and some times others like 7z) natively, it is often a matter of just “enabling” mounting .zip archives in the VFS. If not, it is really not too complex though and .zip fits perfectly the typical VFS approach.
PS: why 7z? I find it is in practice more efficient to compressing add-ons, most likely due to the efficiency on .DDS texture files.
PS: in addition, being able to mount .zip/.7z archives directly would also solve right away the problem with the game not coded to use longer than MAX_PATH length. See here for more details (and solutions):
FS2020 can't deal with pathnames beyond 260 chars, problem and solutions