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A BIG request for all modders - Texture Size


SpaceHole

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I have bought the game some time ago and really enjoy the game a lot yet one thing is getting really annoying - the 32bit limit and the RAM bloat.

After some research i think the main problem are textures and modders.

I looked into many mods and textures seem to be way to big and could be made a lot smoller mostly even without actually loosing visual quality.

Therefore i would ask of modders to look into texture-size more maybe even release their mod with a "low-res" texture pack.

I know this is a lot to ask but i think it would be a great thing for everyone:

- less download-size for the spaceport

- game will run more stabile

- people can actually use way more mods

- modders will get a bigger audience

I thought about editing mods myself but it is actually rather complicated since modders seem to save their textures in different formats not to mention that it is way too much work for everyone to do it by themsleves and its not actually possible to release a low-res or optimized texture version of the mod for obvious reasons.

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There's certainly a lot that can be done to reduce the footprints of some addons, the size of textures is step four or five. Very few packs I'm aware of use asset synonomy to it's full potential, which would straight up eliminate potentially dozens of models and texture sheets from memory. Also KSP does very little to use memory in an optimal way, loading all textures regardless of format into memory as uncompressed bitmaps, the largest possible way to do it without inventing junk. I've seen several modders over the last few weeks looking into changing that, but I haven't seen anything come of it yet. this is exacerbated performance wise by how KSP does not appear to apply any mipmapping to part textures at all, meaning your GPU is trying to render every part using it's highest resolution textures, even if that part ends up as a single pixel. Finally, and arguably the biggest complaint, KSP loads Everything on boot, instead of using any system of partial loading like say recording icons for use in the VAB and only loading parts that exist in flight or for handling in the editors.

in my experience most mods, with a few exceptions, use about an appropriat amount of texture, certainly moreso than Squad's parts (love you Squad, but your folder is my first top for culling parts). But also most mod makers I know would be responsive to somebody ASKING if they could make a low rez version of their textures, as long as that person does a decent job of it.

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I have bought the game some time ago and really enjoy the game a lot yet one thing is getting really annoying - the 32bit limit and the RAM bloat.

After some research i think the main problem are textures and modders.

I looked into many mods and textures seem to be way to big and could be made a lot smoller mostly even without actually loosing visual quality.

Therefore i would ask of modders to look into texture-size more maybe even release their mod with a "low-res" texture pack.

I know this is a lot to ask but i think it would be a great thing for everyone:

- less download-size for the spaceport

- game will run more stabile

- people can actually use way more mods

- modders will get a bigger audience

I thought about editing mods myself but it is actually rather complicated since modders seem to save their textures in different formats not to mention that it is way too much work for everyone to do it by themsleves and its not actually possible to release a low-res or optimized texture version of the mod for obvious reasons.

There is an option in the game to turn texture resolution down, that should suffice.

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Somehow I doubt that option actually reduces the resolution of textures in memory, but rather changes the resolution that they're sent to the GPU at, but also that's a straight procedural downscale, and if the low res textures are made by hand they will likely be far superior because they're designed intently to be lower res. Now the complication arises that some styles are inherently not possible at low res, I suspect it would be significantly difficult to make a LowRes KOSMOS because of the style, but B9 is probably well suited to lower res, it'll lose some of it's character but B9 parts are already very simple overall.

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Yeah for KSP-standard textures. I doubt that this works so well for Mod-Textures? If it does it is not very effective (it seems to have a big effect on the standard textures yet it doesnt seem to work as good on mod-textures)

Also many textures could be made way smaller without loss of resolution or actual visible quality.

I have no idea how good this site is but just as an example:

http://tinypng.org/

Edited by SpaceHole
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Reducing the On Disk File Size does Literally Nothing to the In RAM Data Size, because KSP Converts Everything to Uncompressed Bitmap when loading.

1. Why would it do that?

2. Isnt that actually slowing down the game - why not just have uncompressed Bitmaps in the Gamefolder then?

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slowing down, maybe, textures do have to be largely uncompressed and any good game is going to at some level force all textures to be in the same format. There are some compressed formats that GPUs understand and some modders have been looking at trying to use those formats lately, haven't seen anything of it yet. As far as slowing down, it's extra time during load, and it takes longer to send to the GPU, the big issue is that it takes up a lot of RAM in a limited system. Minimizing the volume of the data On Disk reduces the disk read time but increases the amount of work that needs to be done by the CPU to prepare the data to be used, I for one don't care if KSP takes 4% longer to load when it already takes 5-10 minutes

Why, cuz.

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idk why we arent using .dds textures. dxt1 is sexy, for lack of a better word. each pixel costs 4 bits, and thanks to interpolation can look almost as good as 24-bit uncompressed, and it can be decompressed on hardware (so you never have to decompress it in code). yes there are artifacts, but considering you can use high resolution textures for the cost of a moderate resolution uncompressed texture, its certainly worth it. also the cartoony, non-photorealistic textures would likely compress well without artifacts. you would probibly also want to support dxt5, and possibly newer formats like bc5/3dc (whatever they call it), for things like bitmaps with alpha, normal maps, single channel maps (used for emission), and so on.

i have mostly been avoiding texture chopping because i was rather hoping that squad would adopt sane, industry standard texture formats (that unity and every modern graphics api supports) by now.

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That was one of the big things in the IRC channel last week, if you could actually currently just use .dds and compressed dxt formats /now/ The sticking point seemed to be getting it past the loader. Signs pointed to a plugin to do post-loading and address the .dds textures within the game database system, would make it totally viable.

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All I know is that nothing lags my (6 year old) system more than KSP, whether in an assembly building or in flight. The aluminum housing never gets extremely hot, unless I'm running KSP (I'm guessing that's due to CPU and graphic card trying to deal with simulation calculations on one hand and trying to draw the results on the other hand). In contrast, Half Life 2 (for example) works well. My machine can multitask, but with KSP, only barely.

I'd love it if your discussions lead to a better implementation of models and textures in the game. It can only become a richer experience when that happens. As for mods, they must follow where KSP leads, in terms of efficiency and flow. Thanks for reading.

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I find KSP performance issues come down to a small number of things:

1. Physics calculations

2. Memory

I've never seen my GPU utilization go above 10%, but my Mun base with a Kethane drilling lander, and two tanker/refinery craft, each around ~100 parts, gets me about 5fps with a 2600k CPU. Additionally, I'm constantly going mod-crazy and exceeding the memory limit. Multicore support on a 64-bit executable would make the game insanely faster for me. Rigs of Rods, which is full on soft-body physics simulation, recently did both, and my framerates went up 2-4 times.

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