I was just reading that this can be done over at Curious Labs last night and was wondering about it. It sure would save a lot of my hard drive space if I could compress my runtime directory. Is anyone else doing this? How much does it slow Poser down?

Hi, I've done it. And in most cases it's okay. In my opinion, there is no slowdown-effect when loading a file. The compressionrate is varity (about 60-80% for the most files). But some items are not suitable for this. You have to try it. I load in, than save back with comressing, than i load in the comressed and testing, if it is okay. Sometimes, files have errors (e.g. Free MouseMobile, it has whispers, and my Poser can't load all whispers correct, if the files is compressed, I don't know why). It is a little bit work on testing it, but i can save about 5 or 6 x items in runtime, therefore, the compressing is helpfull for me. One disadvantage of the compressed files is, that you can't them open with a text-Editor. But that's a minor. I activate the compress-option often (also for scene-files). Regards

How about compressed Textures. I was hoping a compressed runtime mean something like a zip file but sounds like it's not what I was thinking.

Oh, that would be fine, but i never heard this before. I fear, that's not able for a long time to load textures from within a zip-file.

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Also, you can convert tif files to jpg and then have your Pzz files use them instead, getting GREAT savings in disk space. I just finished today converting old PP2 files that use tif (HUGE TIF's) so that they use jpg's. The tif's took up around 200MB, while the new jpg set is around 10-15MB.
I used a batch conversion of the tifs to jpg, and then used a text editor to batch re-assign the tif references to jpg.
I also did this with some Pz3's, saving them as Pzz's and
getting lots of space savings...