Just an idea : we can perhaps deal with archives with the help of PHP. (there's an entire chapter in the documentation about this subject:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/refs.compression.php )
It seems to me quite complex to deal with tar files directly in Raydium, but we can easily imagine that the animation system can call PHP when needed. For instance :
- The "user" asks for the "character1" animation
- Animation system (AS to make it short) look for an already existing ".../data/anims/character1" directory
- If not found, look for ".../data/anims/character1.tgz" (tgz is just an example)
- If not found -> R3S, as usual (not found again on servers ? -> error, of course)
- Once tgz file is found / downloaded, AS call PHP to extract the archive to ".../data/anims/character1" directory (and delete tgz ?)
It does not requires any big change to Raydium itself, and PHP seems to offer some sort of native support for this (perhaps with no new dependency :)
We can even imagine that R3S can do the inverse work: when you want to upload a animation with R3S (raydium_modler console -> /upload (?)...character1...(?) ), it generated a tgz archive from the directory and uploads it.
My 2 (probably not so clear :) cents.