Some lesser-known bits of info for addon developers

[Ruedii]

One thing to note on TGAs and PNGs:

KSP does not support palleted TGAs and PNGs.

When I tried using palleted ones in the past, it caused massive graphics corruptions.

I have not yet tested 16bit or 15bit true color, however I wouldn't hold my breath on those either.

In any event KSP imports all images as 32bit RGBA, so it doesn't save memory.

However, as a note, RLA compression on TGA images WILL reduce load time, as the decompression cost on that algorithm is next to nothing, and it saves on hard drive access time.

PNG compression will not, under any circumstances reduce load time as it's decompression is far higher cost. Even when the slowdown issues are fixed, it will be slower to load than TGA. If someone would like to report tests on uncompressed PNGs (which are very similar in format) or if NovaSilisko or any other person with insight into the inner process of KSP's texture loading could fill in the details on the bottleneck, I'm sure it would be useful. This is especially so, since many tools (such as many Linux image viewers) are unable to load TGAs directly as they are considered archaic compared to TIFF.

[frizzank]

There are also some extremely large textures in the squad folder. I don't know what size a 12mb texture is but the landing cabin internals has one along with 5 other 4mb textures.

That one interior asset is 33mb. Im sure there is some room for improvement there as with others....

[NathanKell]

2048x2048 RGB. The others are 1024x1024 RGBA. Also there are a ton of duplicated textures in Spaces.

Polecat_EZ did a good job debloating the internals.

[LostOblivion]

What kind of KSP material from PartTools should I assign to flag decal quads? Also, if I have more than one flag mesh in my model, must I use one FlagDecal-module per flag mesh?

Edit: Translucent without any selected texture seemed to work nice, but my main problem was that there is a bug in KSP that causes flags painted on auto-shrouds not to render. It works in the editor, but once you press launch flags are not shown and the debug log gives a warning from the FlagDecal module.

Edited August 31, 2014 by LostOblivion