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How to Restart


Mr.Rocket

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So my game was loading really slowly, and installed mods that help that, but now my game always crashes. I can turn it on, go into the saves, but once i click on the VAB it crashes every time. I have alot of mods, and if i delete some big ones, it should run faster, correct? But that will destroy some of my saves, which im not really upset about. I want to keep some of the mods though, so i can keep my career mode file with kerbal engineer and crew manifest. How would i go about deleting mods, and saves with those mods, without deleting all the saves?

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Okay, thanks for moving it. To make this question simpler, can i delete some unwanted mods without all of my saves that don't use them also destroyed?

Deleting mods that don't add parts has (in most cases) no impact. I believe that even if you do delete mods that add parts, you will have ships with unidentified parts removed from the persistence file and inaccessible in the VAB/SPH.

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If when a craft is loaded any of the parts it wants are not present, that craft will be deleted; If you have no crafts using a part then nothing will happen if it's removed.

Removing plugin add-ons won't break anything, and removing parts add-ons will only break specific ships that use those parts, leaving the overall save unaffected.

If however you're having such extreme issues as this you might want to just make a new instance and start a new save, you can always come back to this instance but there are some rather drastic things you can do to make KSP lighter.

Firstly, you'll probably want to strip out most of the parts that come with the game. Squad provides a lot of parts and most of them are great, some of them are unnecessary, some of them you just don't use, and some of them have absurd and pointless file sizes.

This is a graphical representation of the size of files in /GameData/Squad/

gHL6aTQh.png

(click)

As you can see in the top left section, Squad provides 722.5MB worth of ON DISK assets, it's difficult to say exactly how much IN RAM that converts to but we can use it for keeping track of reductions vs stock.

Looking at the top right section you can see that 91.5% of that is MBM files, these are a modified bitmap format (modified in that it's called MBM instead of BMP, and not much more), it's uncompressed and KSP/Unity does compress it in memory and it is possible to determine exactly* how much space that takes up IN RAM, but not here and it's not super important to know anyways, just know that texture files are the largest thing, and MBMs take up more ON DISK than they do IN RAM.

There are several key things you can do to open up space, the first is to delete parts, this wholly removes the data associated with the parts. As I said above, Squad provides a lot of parts, many of which you just will not use, eliminating these parts is the cheapest way to open up space as it won't impact your gameplay at all to not have the parts you don't use.

Now if you look back to the top left section, Parts are only 57% of the ON DISK asset volume, 40% is "Spaces", these are the IVAs and unfortunately they're huge. Looking at the big bubbly square map bottom section there's a stark divide a little right of center where it goes from lots of little blue squares to fewer big blue squares, the right side of that divide is Spaces. If you can bear with it and eliminate IVAs, you open up a lot of space quickly. Particularly the big square four on top, that's the SmallLanderCan and Cupola, just two IVAs but they're massive, 5% of the total ON DISK volume each. I will say, it saves a lot but it also disables the IVA view, and makes the kerbal faces in the corner go away, which can really make the experience less.

Now this part is important, if you delete spaces, you MUST go into the cfg files of any command pod that uses that space, and remove the INTERIOR{} block, or your game will go completely insane

The other folders, Props, Sounds, Flags, Resources, are all functionally insignificant, you can delete flags if you want but they're not even 0.1% so you might as well not.

If you want maximum Add-On usage, it is entirely possible to do without /GameData/Squad/Parts or /GameData/Squad/Spaces, but stuff in there might be referenced by other mods so take care keep what you need, eliminate INTERIOR{}s as necessary, and keep track of stuff.

A less drastic reduction you can do, is the Squad Texture Reduction pack http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/51361-0-21-Squad-Texture-Reduction-Pack-B9-and-KW-Packs-also

This is a set of reprocessed texture files that are lower resolution, it will impact your experience but it will also free up a lot of space. It's important to note that a good number of the Squad assets are unnecessarily high res, or have multiple texture files that aren't really needed. It's also important to note that you don't have to use this set in full, you can pick and choose to apply reduced assets to parts you care less about, or to the absurdly large assets such as the SmallLanderCan interiors, this allows you to keep parts but make them take up less space. According to the thread just applying it will reduce the stock 722MB ON DISK, by more than half. Combined with the above elimination of unneeded parts and spaces you could probably get the stock assets under 200MB ON DISK. It's further important to note that KSP loads all assets in GameData, not just the ones that are used by things, so if you do eliminate parts and apply the reduction pack, apply the reduction pack first or go through and delete any textures that get added back and won't be used.

Generally speaking, KSP starts to misbehave if /GameData/ weighs in over about 2.2GB ON DISK, Squad is by default 0.72GB, meaning you can install about 1.5GB worth of add-ons, and this is not including any plugins that may take up more RAM; ISA in particular takes up loads of memory for various reasons. As an absolute rule, KSP on windows cannot use more than 3.4GB of RAM, again it's difficult to convert ON DISK into IN RAM volumes, but remember that Squad provides a lot of in game access that are not within our reach, such as the planets, effects, buildings, UI, etc; technically with Universe Replacer you can fiddle with those, but I've heard nothing but instability with that mod and it's surrounded by people making textures that they don't understand are actually bad for the game (not including the obvious ones that increase fidelity at the cost of performance)

These are all rather drastic things to do and quite likely to break a lot of stuff in saves which is why I suggest you start over with a new instance; but proper culling of /GameData/Squad can significantly increase system performance with minimal impact on the experience. Also keep in mind, these same tactics can be applied to most part packs; remove the stuff you don't use, see if there's a reduced texture pack for it.

Also don't use any legacy-mode addons, they're handled differently and it makes everything break harder (I'm looking at you Touhou). Some of them can be converted to work in GameData but for whatever reason the creator didn't, some of them can't because of plugins or something.

Edited by Greys
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