Huge size of T3FMs, something needs to be done.

Ziemanskye on 2/3/2006 at 07:15

Do we need to put the textures back in?
I seem to remember john P's texture pack just confused the game about where they were and it used the textures from the PCTextures folder instead.

I don't use them myself (never have) so I don't know how it affected performance, but if its still looking for the textures, but they aren't in the ibt (because you stripped them out) but can find them anyway, do we need to recompile at all?

Crispy on 2/3/2006 at 12:25

In the interim, while Shadowspawn finds time to work his magic (atta boy! :thumb:), perhaps FM authors could also upload the source files as separate archives. As long as they're clearly marked for "advanced users with T3Ed installed only" it should be okay. Not much of a solution, I know, but perhaps it would ease the bandwidth burden slightly without too much effort.

Then again, what percentage of people involved with T3 FMs actually have the editor installed? I'm guessing not a lot.

Shadowspawn on 2/3/2006 at 14:36

Perhaps I am mis-remembering the older threads on this topic, but I think there's a significant problem. (Or more work for me to do).

In a standard T3 install, I cannot find the raw textures. They appear to be locked inside the IBT files. Is this true?

I guess the solution would be to locate textures in standard T3 IBT files, store that info in the compressed IBT, and then go access the original IBT from a standard Thief install to re-inflate the CBT file. Although that avoids me having to do any format conversions (if any), it's a bit more work overall.

Does this sound right? It would probably make the FM designer's job a little harder, because they would need to run the compressor against a standard T3 install, so it could locate standard resources. But I don't think it would be too much of a hack.

Thoughts? :confused:

ascottk on 2/3/2006 at 14:54

When I was zipping up static meshes for distribution I noticed t3ed can use those meshes from the zip. There might be a way to tell t3 to add/replace the zipped contents through an ini file :confused:

Crispy on 3/3/2006 at 02:08

Yeah, all the textures are in the IBT files as far as I know. If you're able to extract them then I think that would work fine; it doesn't matter that the FM players would need the OMs around, since they probably would want them anyway.

Ziemanskye on 3/3/2006 at 07:17

I have to admit that part of me likes the idea of a one-time texture download. I mean in that if people want to dl john-Ps into the folder then it'd update all the FMs or whatever.

You could maybe still re-inflate the ibts if you wanted, but I thought I'd say.

New Horizon on 3/3/2006 at 15:04

Yeah, the ibt's would definately still need to be reinflated...otherwise the load times would be well over five minutes.

Ziemanskye on 3/3/2006 at 19:27

Which they will be anyway if ascottk's textures ever make it to mass market

(I kid, I kid - they look good, but there's no denying the extra size)

Shadowspawn on 4/3/2006 at 19:28

I've been playing around with the IBT again, had a few hours to work on it in the last few days.

I wrote a quick program to dump the headers of any IBT file, just to see what's in them. It looks like all the resources for a given map are in there.

So, the next step was to write a program to analyze a FM IBT file, and see what I can match up existing resources. I decided to play with "Evicted", since it's the one I'm currently playing (yes, I need to take time out and play sometimes :tsktsk: ).

Well, on my first pass, I can collapse about 1/2 of the IBT file. I found about 1/2 of the resources in the stock IBT files. There should be alot more, but some resource names have been changed!

For example, this one matched;
Matched entry for GENxTOOLBOX to Entry in HauntedHouse2.cnt, Name GENxTOOLBOX

but, later in the file I find;
Unable to match entry for genxtoolbox--0 1.00000 1.00000 1.00000

There seem to be lots of resource / object names which have a "--(number) 3 coordinates" appended. I need to verify that the "--(number) etc" can be safely ignored, then this will really grind down the IBT file to only custom or unused (in the OMs) resources. And I can leave those right where they are in the IBT and just remove the rest.

Since I don't have to figure out the format of all the resources THEMSELVES, just copy them out of an existing IBT, this gets much simpler.

I'll do some more experiments, but if this continues along this vein, I should have something in a week or two. (But, I'm sure I stumble across something which will derail this whole idea.) :mad:

Stay tuned.

New Horizon on 4/3/2006 at 20:47

Hmm, if the resources can't be found in the vanilla T3 ibt's, might it be possible just to take all the textures from the editor and package them up as a one time download?