I'm working on a new game, and its related level editor, based on Ogre3D. I was thinking about how i could manage the game files, knowing that Ogre use .mesh files for models, .material for materials/texture information etc... . At first i thought about a common .zip folder decompressed at runtime (the same way Torchlight and Ogre samples do). But this way the game assets become a monolithic archive, loading takes time, and could be difficult to eventually patch them. So, let's say i have a game object named "Cube" i want to load in my program. Going for modularity, what if i create a compressed file (using zlib compression routines) named Cube.extname, containing its sub-files Cube.mesh, Cube.material and so on ? Are there any alternatives or should i stick with compressed objects?

PS: Just to clear things, the answer is unrelated to my program code, at the moment i'm using "resources.cfg" pointing to the OgreSDK media directory.