[0.23] Squad Texture Reduction Pack - B9 and KW Packs also

[amo28]

Right. Then what else is in the zip? Is it a Squad folder? What's step 3 in the instructions?

[Jivaii]

Now we just need a B9 redux and we're good =D

This dropped me down about 100mb on ram. I'm more then happy about that.

[PolecatEZ]

From the instructions:

Place the Debloat.bat in your /GameData folder

In the .zip from Spaceport, there is no Debloat.bat. There is bloatKiller.bat, and all it does it delete things.

I have updated the wildly different spelling of the batch file, good catch. However, all it still does is delete things. After this, you must then follow steps 3 and 4 (annotated by the 3rd and 4th "-" on the list) in the instructions. Step 4 is actually entirely optional, and useful really only if you can, in fact, profit from this particular listing of actions. At least by step 3 you should have accomplished most of the useful actions you can take, however, be sure to precede step 3 by performing steps 1 and 2, but with the mispelled .bat file (the only .bat file in the .zip). Do not perform these steps out of order or something may explode. I hope this was clear.

Now we just need a B9 redux and we're good =D

This dropped me down about 100mb on ram. I'm more then happy about that.

B9 is mostly in .png's, so its easy to resize yourself if you really want. If the creator lets me though, I'd be happy to run it through the pipeline and make a texture redux pack. I gave up asking to fix people's stuff though, I always end up being the beggar - how the conversation usually goes:

- "Please let me fix your stuff...pah-leease! At least update it so it works with 21.1, here, I've already done the work just take it and post the fix."

- "No."

Hence why I've vowed that everything I ever create/do for this game will have the MIT license.

Edited October 2, 2013 by PolecatEZ
spelling errors

[Jivaii]

I have updated the wildly different spelling of the batch file, good catch. However, all it still does is delete things. After this, you must then follow steps 3 and 4 (annotated by the 3rd and 4th "-" on the list) in the instructions. Step 4 is actually entirely optional, and useful really only if you can, in fact, profit from this particular listing of actions. At least by step 3 you should have accomplished most of the useful actions you can take, however, be sure to precede step 3 by performing steps 1 and 2, but with the mispelled .bat file (the only .bat file in the .zip). Do not perform these steps out of order or something may explode. I hope this was clear.

B9 is mostly in .png's, so its easy to resize yourself if you really want. If the creator lets me though, I'd be happy to run it through the pipeline and make a texture redux pack. I gave up asking to fix people's stuff though, I always end up being the beggar - how the conversation usually goes:

- "Please let me fix your stuff...pah-leease! At least update it so it works with 21.1, here, I've already done the work just take it and post the fix."

- "No."

Hence why I've vowed that everything I ever create/do for this game will have the MIT license.

Drat. I fail at redoing textures myself, mostly due to being horribly out of practice and not having time to actually get back into it.

[little square dot]

Thanks for doing the grunt work man. Much appreciated. =)

*edit

commie hipster boxes.

bahaha..

Edited October 2, 2013 by little square dot

[Technical Ben]

Thanks! Might give this a try!

[NathanKell]

What is your pipeline, if I might inquire? I've been doing my own resizing off and on, and wondered how much more complicated a process you were doing than straight-up batch-resize with a good resize algorithm...

And lol-yes on the fixit stuff. Although I've generally been much more lucky. Generally.

[Zeroignite]

For reference, when you say there's "no visible reduction in quality", what resolution are you playing at?

[Psycix]

So how does this work?

Compression?

Resizing and lowering resolution?

Getting rid of LOD?

Getting rid of unused files?

[PolecatEZ]

So far I've been doing this:

- Copy out the Squad folder.

- In that working folder, delete all files that are NOT of a specific size (4mb, 1mb, etc).

- Make a .tga template for that file size with the matching channels, etc. in Photoshop. File size should be close to identical.

- Open it with Hex editor, copy the first 18 characters to clipboard.

- Run through and paste over the first 20 characters on every .mbm file of the appropriate size.

- batch rename every file to .tga

- In photoshop, flip the red and blue channels (I have a saved profile for this), and kill the alpha channel. Then resize and save (no easy shortcut for this, but with practice I can do it manually while watching marathon Breaking Bad).

- Unless there's insane details, normal maps don't need to be bigger than 256x256

- Textures on small objects (.5m parts or smaller) can be 256 (512 with fine letters/writing)

- Medium objects generally are 512 or so.

- Highly detailed or large objects should stay at 1024, but this process still knocks them down 25%.

- Done.

It is possible to run through with Hexedit and change them back to .mbm's, but then its a PITA when you want to edit them later if you messed something up.

Its also possible to convert to .png's, but this makes the space savings a little obscure, as the game still re-bloats them to .tga sizes when it loads, and it may increase loading time (no idea). It also kills a bit of detail.

As you can see, its a lot of grunt work and not exactly skilled labor. I thought about drafting my 6 year old kid to doing some tedious parts but he started grumbling when I even mentioned it. Darn it, when I was his age I was losing a finger every week for 2 years in the textile mills...

[RabidMonkey]

I have updated the wildly different spelling of the batch file, good catch. However, all it still does is delete things. After this, you must then follow steps 3 and 4 (annotated by the 3rd and 4th "-" on the list) in the instructions. Step 4 is actually entirely optional, and useful really only if you can, in fact, profit from this particular listing of actions. At least by step 3 you should have accomplished most of the useful actions you can take, however, be sure to precede step 3 by performing steps 1 and 2, but with the mispelled .bat file (the only .bat file in the .zip). Do not perform these steps out of order or something may explode. I hope this was clear.

That got it - thanks!

[Helix935]

i think i just found how low the quality has to be before it is noticeable which is a eighth-resolution

[HeadHunter67]

For reference, when you say there's "no visible reduction in quality", what resolution are you playing at?

I play at 1600x900 and "Good" texture resolution (primarily for smooth play) and it looks as good now as it did before.

[NathanKell]

Ah, right, the bitwise compatibility of raw formats.

I convert to pbm and then run an action in PS to rescale and save as TGA.

Don't you run into a problem with 32bit normal maps coming out 24bit?

[Commander Gizmo]

So far I've been doing this:

- Copy out the Squad folder.

- In that working folder, delete all files that are NOT of a specific size (4mb, 1mb, etc).

- Make a .tga template for that file size with the matching channels, etc. in Photoshop. File size should be close to identical.

- Open it with Hex editor, copy the first 18 characters to clipboard.

- Run through and paste over the first 20 characters on every .mbm file of the appropriate size.

- batch rename every file to .tga

- In photoshop, flip the red and blue channels (I have a saved profile for this), and kill the alpha channel. Then resize and save (no easy shortcut for this, but with practice I can do it manually while watching marathon Breaking Bad).

- Unless there's insane details, normal maps don't need to be bigger than 256x256

- Textures on small objects (.5m parts or smaller) can be 256 (512 with fine letters/writing)

- Medium objects generally are 512 or so.

- Highly detailed or large objects should stay at 1024, but this process still knocks them down 25%.

- Done.

It is possible to run through with Hexedit and change them back to .mbm's, but then its a PITA when you want to edit them later if you messed something up.

Its also possible to convert to .png's, but this makes the space savings a little obscure, as the game still re-bloats them to .tga sizes when it loads, and it may increase loading time (no idea). It also kills a bit of detail.

As you can see, its a lot of grunt work and not exactly skilled labor. I thought about drafting my 6 year old kid to doing some tedious parts but he started grumbling when I even mentioned it. Darn it, when I was his age I was losing a finger every week for 2 years in the textile mills...

Couldn't you use the actions in photoshop to automate those manual steps? I think it records what you do and then applies the same filters and settings each time.

[PolecatEZ]

i think i just found how low the quality has to be before it is noticeable which is a eighth-resolution

I think it depends also heavily on the size of the object. 1024x1024 stretched over a Rockomax 64 would be far more noticeable when shrunk compared to something that's already tiny (like that darned throttle handle). That's why on the resize you sort of have to eyeball it on the bigger objects to make sure you don't get too fuzzy. Another drawback is when modders "stretch" or resize them to a larger size, it becomes quite noticeable.

[NoMrBond]

It would be nice if Unity (and thus by extension KSP) would support NPOT textures (without 'supporting' them by just blimping them up to the nearest larger POT size).

[BigFatStupidHead]

PolecatEZ, you should check out duplicate-asset-memory-reduction by somnambulist. Some of your EVA work may already be done for you.

[Maeyanie]

Its also possible to convert to .png's, but this makes the space savings a little obscure, as the game still re-bloats them to .tga sizes when it loads, and it may increase loading time (no idea). It also kills a bit of detail.

It wouldn't lose any detail, .png uses lossless compression. But you're right that it wouldn't save any more memory.

[Jivaii]

Polecat, looked at the license for B9, which can be found here

You are free:

to Share  to copy, distribute and transmit the work

to Remix  to adapt the work

sounds to me like you can re-do textures and release a patch for those.

[Hakari]

I don't see how this might work unless you reduced the resolution of the textures. The main reason the squad folder is large is because the .mbm texture format is a lossless uncompressed bitmap. When you load your game every texture will be internally converted to something else anyway, regardless of your original format or file size.

[PolecatEZ]

PolecatEZ, you should check out duplicate-asset-memory-reduction by somnambulist. Some of your EVA work may already be done for you.

I actually tried this exact same thing 2 days ago, and couldn't get it to work. It even looks like he did the exact same thing...the file screenshot looks exactly like mine, except I put all the shared assets into a "common" folder and tried loading things from there. I'll dig out my own files and keep working on them that way also, but the two test models I looked at were both pretty borked, and I assumed what Greys said in that threat, that model is only a sub-function of PART. Somn demonstrated different though, and now I need to figure out why/how. I may have just coincidentally picked the two to test that he also said were borked. Between texture reduction and this method, the "Spaces" folder could become very squished.

Either way, I'll take those back out of my archive and mess with them. The texture re-makes are done, but I think I'll hold off until I can figure that out.

===================

I see where the memory thing happens, but using his pack just removes all my internal spaces entirely. Using dummy .mbm's like he does with my own config files just gives me blue parts instead of white parts. There was another guy that said that it would work on my own mod pre-release post, and he never got back to me afterwards to say if he could get it to work.

Scratch the dead again comment...its now working again...until it doesn't.

Edited October 3, 2013 by PolecatEZ

[KhaosCorp]

BRILLIANT!!

This is something Squad should have been doing for some time now. Why they use .mbm is past me..unless they are actually stupid enough to think it protects their assets lol.......

Thank you for doing this, anything that gives a little more freedom as to what mods I can install puts a smile on my face =)

[NathanKell]

Just a bump re: the 32bit textures. Is it really safe to always dump the alpha channel?

(And I note that your TGA normal maps, unlike all others I've seen, come out gray rather than the usual blue-red-purple....)

[PolecatEZ]

BRILLIANT!!

This is something Squad should have been doing for some time now. Why they use .mbm is past me..unless they are actually stupid enough to think it protects their assets lol.......

Thank you for doing this, anything that gives a little more freedom as to what mods I can install puts a smile on my face =)

I think the .mbm format is a Unity engine product and not necessarily a reflection of Squad's intelligence. A little tact goes a long way, just sayin'. I tend to save my illustrious vocabulary and sharp-tongued wit for those that deserve it more.

Just a bump re: the 32bit textures. Is it really safe to always dump the alpha channel?

(And I note that your TGA normal maps, unlike all others I've seen, come out gray rather than the usual blue-red-purple....)

The only drawback I've noticed is things like transparent windows and such. If anyone sees any issues let me know. The gray maps I thought were normal as that's exactly how they turn out with the same process as the normal textures, and I haven't seen any issues yet with that either.

If anyone notices anything funny, please let me know and I'll tinker some more.

I did finally figure out what I was doing wrong with the spaces, and its Somnabulance's empty placeholder textures. Apparently Spaces need them while regular parts don't when you change the texture pointers with the "Model" line command set. Going one space at a time now, and testing thoroughly. I should have another 200mb shaved off tomorrow or Friday.

Edited October 3, 2013 by PolecatEZ