Workshop file size uploads

[banjotails]

Just curious and wondering why peoples Thememaker's Toolkit uploads have such large sizes for small items? Example: 3.642MB, 11.073 MB

But looking at planet coaster used game piece buildings, which are quite large with hundred or thousands of bits, they come in at for example 0.125MB, 0.129MB
Or even a full park map filled with thousands of items coming in at 13.342 MB.

So what are people doing wrong when building? Is it the model or textures? Wont the file sizes slow down the game and parks in general each time you add the item?

Shouldn't Frontier be addressing these issues by saying hey you are not doing things correctly and this is what you should be looking at and addressing. Even updating the guide to reflect what is the best option and similar to what they already use.

 

[Castaway1]

Well the File Size is mainly due to the textures. And since we can put up to 2048x2048 textures.

At first I was like : "oh I want to make the best quality object" so my texture were 2048x2048, but I saw the file size and I dropped my textures to 1024x1024, which divided the file size by two and I didn't saw any difference in-game, even with textures settings put to High. Guessing 2048x2048 isn't really needed.

 

[banjotails]

Which is my point i guess.

Should it be made clear you really should use lower textures or here is a example to keep file sizes to in game specs. I just don't understand how a park would function if you add more and more UGC content when the file sizes are double, triple in game items.

Great wall you added btw.

 

[JaySL1]

I guess most people think that bigger texture size would produce a high quality object which in fact it is not. Back in RCT3 I used 512x512 and I got really nice results. I think we should create a post with some basic guidelines to have performant objects without sacrificing its quality.

 

[MsRedNebula]

Note that it's not always the textures. I've been careful to keep my texture sizes smaller than maximum - I decided on 1024 x 1024 for the butterfly I'm working on. The total size of the texture and material files ended up being 1.03 MB (and I haven't decided yet if I want to do an AO file too, I want to see how it looks in game first). The .fbx file I exported from Blender adds another 1.16 MB into the mix. I didn't figure the object, even including animation, would be that large, but there it is!

That said, I'm certain you're right, and people are just using 2048 by default, driving the size up. The guide isn't clear on what would be considered an overly-large total file size, either, and it'd be nice to have some guidance there!

The only thing in the guide is this statement: "The ideal texel rate for Planet Coaster is 256x256 pixels per square metre", which is a smidge vague to us newbies. I assume it means for one side of a 1m cube, you would need a 256 square map. So if your cube had the same texture on all sides, you could get by with a single 256x256 file. Am I on the right track?

 

[Nupol1]

jea 1Mx1M = 256x256 pixels

so if a Wall is 2Mx2M the optimal texture size should be 512x512

 

[Castaway1]

I've noticed that my zip file that is about 3mo, once transformed as a planet coaster item goes up to 9mo !

 

[Nupol1]

changed my textures from 1k to 512 and the zip was under 1 mb (before around 3 mb)

 

[Brett C]

Ideally, textures shouldn't be at or exceed 1024x1024. Optimally, 256x256 or 512x512 should be the upper bounds for added texture pixel sizes vs quality. Always keep in mind: you may have have a powerful computer, but the next person may not.

 

[MsRedNebula]

Ideally, textures shouldn't be at or exceed 1024x1024. Optimally, 256x256 or 512x512 should be the upper bounds for added texture pixel sizes vs quality. Always keep in mind: you may have have a powerful computer, but the next person may not.

Thank you for the clarification! It might be a good idea to add a note about this in the guide too. Not everyone comes to the forum, and a lot of people seem to be taking 2048x2048 as gospel.

 

[WendyIsWishing]

Also note that the size of a park is not directly linked to the size of the individual objects. Planet Coaster is several gigabytes big and a lot of that is assets! If you actually begin adding TMTK objects to your park and then look at the file size you'll notice it doesn't exponentially increase

 

[OlaHaldor]

(...) looking at planet coaster used game piece buildings, which are quite large with hundred or thousands of bits, they come in at for example 0.125MB, 0.129MB
Or even a full park map filled with thousands of items coming in at 13.342 MB.

I have a hunch it's because the user generated designs made with in-game assets is in fact metadata (a text file) which tells the game which parts were used, where they're at, how they're colored. Thus you don't actually download any mesh - only the required information for the game to understand what's going on.

If it was in fact a true 3D model, you'd probably see the file sizes up in the tens, if not hundreds of megabytes depending on its scale and number of parts. I've seen some incredible work in the workshop that has a crazy amount of parts to make up the design. [wacky]

So what are people doing wrong when building? Is it the model or textures? Wont the file sizes slow down the game and parks in general each time you add the item?

They're not doing anything wrong, except maybe using unique textures per asset, and at high resolutions.
My roman column and base were in fact made to use the same texture, but for obvious reasons they can't share that texture because they are two separate assets. I really wish we could share textures between assets to save both space, vram and.. well.. redundant textures floating around in memory.

I'd love to make a complete roman set, but I guess it would end up in the hundreds of megabytes in the end if i were to use unique designed textures per asset. If I were to go with tiled textures I could go down to 256^2 or 512^2, but it'd still become a considerable size because none of the assets can share the same stone texture between them. THat's something I hope they will change as things progress with the toolkit!

 

[corkscrewloop]

There are scenery items in the TMT ws section with >10MB file size... Simple items -> if I download 100 such items I need 1GB storage, if I put all of them into a parkfile, does it eat 1GB of memory? If so, the game will lag very soon. I've seen much more complex selfmade 3d objects in other games, which do not even need 10% of the size of such simple TMT items... This seems to me not optimized. Experts, please explain.[where is it]

 

[davaze]

I was wondering if the textures are somehow converted as MIP Map textures when loaded in the game? Are the textures also reduced in resolution when moving away from the object, similar to the LOD's created? If not is there a way to use this kind of textures, as it would be logical to have higher resolution textures up close and less when far away. Just wondering.

 

[Brett C]

There are scenery items in the TMT ws section with >10MB file size... Simple items -> if I download 100 such items I need 1GB storage, if I put all of them into a parkfile, does it eat 1GB of memory? If so, the game will lag very soon. I've seen much more complex selfmade 3d objects in other games, which do not even need 10% of the size of such simple TMT items... This seems to me not optimized. Experts, please explain.[where is it]

If memory serves right, objects are loaded into RAM-space at initial load-in time. I could be wrong on this, and it might be done someway differently.

 

[MsRedNebula]

I'd also be curious to know what the comparable size of in-game objects ends up being. Small things like a window, medium things like a hippo, big things like a kraken, how much difference it makes for a static object versus an animated one... having those numbers to compare to could also help ensure we're on the right track.

 

[WendyIsWishing]

I also want to put out there that part of this has to do with whatever the TMTK is doing to people's files! One of my models had a non-zipper folder that was 125kb, but after going through TMTK it was 890kb! That's an exponential amount of space to add to a file! I'm seeing some people uploading 800-900kb files and having the TMTK spit out 2mb+ files for smaller objects, perhaps some of this is in part the proprietary file type and needs to be looked into?