PSA: The original squad files are the biggest memory hogs.

[GavinZac]

Is your game crashing because you thought ISAMap, Kethane, KWRocketry and B9 Aerospace were all essential? Maaaan they take up like 250mb!

You know what else takes up 250mb?

The stock internal views! (IVA). I never use these. I removed them (safely), and bam, my game is loading again.

Even the other stock parts are ridiculously large compared to what most mod providers give - 8mb models, where a 1mb model would do, and so on.

I wish Squad would either optimise those parts, or release a 'low-q' version, because I'm really not seeing a quality difference between the stock and mod engines, apart from filesize.

If there are Squad parts you no longer use, try removing them. If there are any you need, the game will simply tell you at the tracking station. Back-up before you do this, obviously.

[PDCWolf]

Stock parts have a sh**load of useless polygons where simple textures could've done the trick. Every default model has this problem (from parts to planets and buildings).

Also, shouldn't this be on the development subforum?

[Mercy]

Muh polygons.

[whatisthisidonteven]

"poly-optimise" is not in nova's vocabulary.

Edited June 20, 2013 by whatisthisidonteven

[Nutbag Deluxe]

Yep, a lower polycount on a lot of stock parts would be better, and is absolutely possible without degrading any detail, especially if you texture the models properly.

[NovaSilisko]

Poly count is generally far less of a memory issue than texture size - of which the IVA spaces have massive amounts of. Most of the textures in the IVA folder are using the completely uncompressed MBM format and are in the range of 2048x2048, and therefore insanely huge, but all of them were made before we actually had had the TGA/PNG export options.

There was a plan to re-export all stock parts and IVA spaces in the game using the far-smaller compressed TGA format back around .18 or .19, but I don't know what happened to it. I think a statistic mike quoted when he ran an attempt was that the game's overall filesize was reduced by 2/3rds.

Edited June 20, 2013 by NovaSilisko

[Nutbag Deluxe]

There was a plan to re-export all stock parts and IVA spaces in the game using the far-smaller compressed TGA format back around .18 or .19, but I don't know what happened to it. I think a statistic mike quoted when he ran an attempt was that the game's overall filesize was reduced by 2/3rds.

Wouldn't that be a great way to further optimize the game, or are there serious drawbacks to that method?

[TouhouTorpedo]

Makes sense. I find a good chunk of my load time is sitting on the stock IVA's loading. Updating these to PNG/TGA really needs to be made a higher priority, or at least updating the proprietary format to have compression.