inacceptable size

[+76.IAP-Blackbird 3,557]

Does it work, haven`t tried it yet, but if you imagine, that every screen is over 2,5 MB large, you need 2, for loading and launch one, for every plane?! If you have only 100 planes this is a 500Mb Harddisk killer!

I can life with a JPG solution for those screens, it would save a lot of space and loading time. We musst find a way to reduce the size of this game a bit, My install without NF4 is over 49,3 GB (52.937.027.584 Bytes) large and I think this is not an acceptable size.

 

Is TK planing something in this way?!

 

how do you think about it?

 

Cause my rig has some trouble to deal with such an amount of sensless data.... and no I don`t need a new one ;-)

 

E6600 Dualcore

4 GB RAM

8800 512 MB

1 TB HDD SATA2

 

I think this should be enough for this game?!

Edited November 9, 2009 by 76.IAP-Blackbird

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

We musst find a way to reduce the size of this game a bit

Donne! .... at least for SF1.

 

For loading screens, I put all the bmp's in another non-game folder I call AA....

 

LoadingScreen=D:\AA\F-106A.bmp

 

 

Shared cockpits I put into a folder called A...

 

Directory=D:\A\F-106A\Cockpit

 

On very rare occasions, the radar does not work so I work around that by putting only the radar.bmp in an otherwise empty Cockpit folder, and accessing that radar.bmp with the Avionics file. Other than those few exceptions, none of my Aircraft folders have Cockpit folders.

 

I don't use any hanger screens, just a blank bmp. No bmp files at all in my aircraft files as I know the loadout locations. I reduce all skins because I see the game as mostly what you see from the cockpit during gameplay and with alot of these old jets you see NOTHING of your own airplane at all, and other planes are at high relative speeds at far beyond Screenshot Range.

 

I was working on doing decals the same way before my Windows crash this summer gave me a reason to joyfully forget SF for a while. Accessing decals from a non-game folder does work though.

 

I have over 100 SAC, NAVY, RAF, IAPVO, and Flygvapnet planes installed at not too much over 1GB SF total. Very snappy. I admit I went overboard with skin reduction BUT it matches the best detail you would see of other aircraft when looking from your player cockpit.

[Wrench 9,846]

Admitidly, I had to wonder about the thread title for second!!

 

Are we talking TOS or NextGen sims?

 

wrench

kevin stein

[+76.IAP-Blackbird 3,557]

Ah I see some confusion, I was refering to SF2

[+Brain32 265]

Damage textures are now in .DDS format so that's another relief

What would be cool are the skins in DDS format, although I suspect that would demand some engine ironing.

[eraser_tr 29]

I asked about it and TK said they become converted to dds format in the process of rendering them or something to that effect. Which begs the question, why not stick em in that format and save the processing power converting bmp to dds, AND save at least 25GB of hard drive space.

 

Forgot to mention, TK did allow some screens to be JPG format now. Menu screens at least, so maybe hangar screens work too?

Edited November 10, 2009 by eraser_tr

[+Brain32 265]

I asked about it and TK said they become converted to dds format in the process of rendering them or something to that effect. Which begs the question, why not stick em in that format and save the processing power converting bmp to dds, AND save at least 25GB of hard drive space.

 

Forgot to mention, TK did allow some screens to be JPG format now. Menu screens at least, so maybe hangar screens work too?

 

Hangar screens work as advetised, all my hangar and loading screens are JPG's now. I also converted most damage textures to .dds thus I REALLY hope TK does not plan to revert dmg textures back to TGA as I will go apsolutely nuts and burn my computer down

[luckyluca 0]

I noticed the same, huge disk sizes, so I started opening the flight and terrain image files of both the vietnam ground expansion pack and nf4+ in photoshop and realized how unefficiently big some of them are.

Imagine there are huge textures for a single window for far away buildings, not acceptable, no wonders the sim runs slowly compared to lets say x-plane of fsx.

In this I have to admit nf4+ is much tidier and, apart from wideskys all the other textures could be left alone on highend systems.

So I just setup a photoshop batch task to resize down all opened files to 50% with a sharpened filter and loaded all textures I thought were too big and bam the sim doesn't look any different but I gained framerates and diskspace :)

framekillers are the sky cloud textures and trees most of the time. I hope it helps

 

Luca

[+76.IAP-Blackbird 3,557]

I have now reduced the amount of skins to the ones the birds use as a standart skin, and reached a new size

 

41,3 GB (44.370.358.272 Bytes

 

still optimising

[Guest Eject]

I have now reduced the amount of skins to the ones the birds use as a standart skin, and reached a new size

 

41,3 GB (44.370.358.272 Bytes

 

still optimising

 

me join u guys. I too found out that the .bmp files of each plane is overpopulating mu meager HDD of only 80Gigs, so I always immediately change my screeny bmp to jpg, and move to other dir. That is when we deal only with screeny.

 

On the Aircract sub-folder, I really have problem to reduce the bmps, since when I set them to medium, the planes looked dull. The tecture I mean.

 

So huge is my bmp files on my planes, that my WOE now reached almost ELEVEN GB!!!

 

Yes, any info on how to use jpg instead of bmp on Loading part will be very helpful. So, I copy this page right away and will read it later this evening. Thanks guys

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

still optimising

:rofl:

 

haha I spent ALOT of time doing that same thing. Now....no more than 2 Gigs tops, ah depending on the breaks.

 

Easiest thing to start with is put all loading files in another non-game folder anywhere, even another drive. You can access this folder from different installs. At least for SF1. Using Win7 here.

[Guest Eject]

:rofl:

 

haha I spent ALOT of time doing that same thing. Now....no more than 2 Gigs tops, ah depending on the breaks.

 

Easiest thing to start with is put all loading files in another non-game folder anywhere, even another drive. You can access this folder from different installs. At least for SF1. Using Win7 here.

 

But, by that 'method, will the engine still can read the bmp files of each flyable planes/non-flying? Or, the Loading page will then be exhibiting the default, very dull LP like the standard Silver F-15 in WOI or the F-4 in WOE? Thanks