Dear Heatblur: You need to get your F-14's liveries folder under control.

[DSplayer]

My brothers in christ, the majority of the preinstalled skins for the F-14s are extremely detailed. And like what other people have pointed out, the more modern modules and modern skins are also larger. If you compare the Mirage 2000C's stock "AdA Chasse 2-5" skin to the new "MISSION ACCOMPLIE" skin, you'll see that it's 22.1 MBs compared to 247 MBs respectively. This is down to, of course, more files in the "MISSION ACCOMPLIE" skin since it has more detail. This can be directly compared to F-14 recent stock skins where they have a lot of files due to custom roughmets, normal maps, pilot models textures, etc. A lot of the F-14 skins that we have now are incredibly detailed and its completely understandable why the liveries folder for both the A and B, from at least from an amateur liveries maker's POV, total up to ~12 GBs. 

 

Also if you compare the newer F-14 skins that have all those custom roughmets, etc. with the stock F-14B skins that basically came out on the EA release a couple years ago, you can also see that those are smaller while also not having those custom roughmets and stuff. Idk I felt that this argument is rather pedantic and rather unnecessary since more detail and more skins = more storage usage. I'm honestly grateful that HB was able to give us a pretty great paint kit with loads of customizability. 

[XCNuse]

2 hours ago, lunaticfringe said:

new F-16 liveries

The Viper was released half a year later; is plenty high quality in texture clarity and resolution.

it has 51 liveries; 10 less than the F-14

 

and yet: (it's less than 4.5GB en total)

 

2 hours ago, DSplayer said:

from at least from an amateur liveries maker's POV,

You don't count then, because you are quite literally 100% on board with downloading and looking at other extremely oversized textures. You are more unique in this situation than someone like myself.

If HB offered even higher resolution skins... you would download them; and you probably wouldn't complain you had to do that either?

 

I'm still letting it sink in that 14% of DCS in a vanilla state is the F-14, and that doesn't even require ownership.

This is not a skewed view.

This is exactly what is offered when people download DCS and are greeted with the incredibly loud menu music for the first time.

 

You're being selfish, and telling customers, ED's customers, and othe rthird parties potential customers, to go buy larger drives, for something you've done....

Nobody else, including ED has a singular flying module that consumes over 7GB

[Mach3DS]

Since I've made some of these Liveries in question, I can tell you that I'm terms of quality, here's a bit of a sneak peak behind the curtain to the process.  As I work on a livery, it's authenticity is scrutinized by the livery team via update pics, questions, vast historical research photos etc, other artists weighing in.  Eventually, it's given the thumbs up once it meets the standard.  With the tools, creativity of the artists and the absolute accessibility and plain common sense and consideration that Cobra gives to the individual team member's input, I can't imagine a more forward thinking and reasonable group of people to work with than what I've experienced working with the HB team.  If any words describe best their mission, the words Precision, detailed, accurate, and thorough come to mind regarding the quality of their products.  The very fiber of the DNA of the people who populate this team simply won't allow them to produce something of lesser quality than that which can ultimately be achieved.  I've been in the simming world for over 25 years and I've never seen anything like what we have now.  DCS and Heatblur, are on the leading edge of simming.  Anyway, If there's something "sub par" about my Liveries, let me know with specifics. Thanks.   

[TheGopnikTsar]

This forum post is taking up too much space this is really 3 pages about the tomcat liveries taking up too much space if 12gb is really that much space just move the tomcat onto a flash drive that you can get for like 10 dollars 

Edited October 31, 2022 by TheGopnikTsar

[near_blind]

31 minutes ago, XCNuse said:

it has 51 liveries; 10 less than the F-14

~13 of those liveries are unique, full aircraft liveries that have full files. The rest are simply changed tail flashes.  

[freehand]

So am I thinking correctly if you do not own the tomcat you use 12gb of space ? for the tomcat.

[lunaticfringe]

11 minutes ago, XCNuse said:

The Viper was released half a year later; is plenty high quality in texture clarity and resolution.

it has 51 liveries; 10 less than the F-14

And it's most recent liveries are heftier than the F-14, and will be so going forward.  Just like everyone else's, which amusingly is the part you refuse to catch up to.  Corsair.  F-15E.  A-7.  F-4- everybody is playing ball with the new HD livery reality; detail plus roughmets and all the particulars to give additional visual impact are expensive on the drive; less so in the vram.   

 

11 minutes ago, XCNuse said:

If HB offered even higher resolution skins... you would download them; and you probably wouldn't complain you had to do that either?

And so what if he didn't complain?  His interests and storage availability are different than yours.  This isn't a protest rally to shame someone for having a different set of priorities. 

 

11 minutes ago, XCNuse said:

I'm still letting it sink in that 14% of DCS in a vanilla state is the F-14, and that doesn't even require ownership.

It's definitely sunk, brother- Captain Nemo has sent up his regards.

 

11 minutes ago, XCNuse said:

You're being selfish, and telling customers, ED's customers, and othe rthird parties potential customers, to go buy larger drives, for something you've done....

It's similarly selfish to continue making an argument that creators disagree with, when the actual corrective answer has been mentioned and you refuse to champion towards that cause.  Your contention is that they need to stop producing quantity and quality, when in fact the solution lay in having the requirement for the liveries to be downloaded at all removed. 

If it were just available contract bandwidth cap for downloads or being really hard up for storage, that's one thing, but this is willful denial of the facts at hand- both client performance impact as well as the here and now, forward progression of livery storage cost for detailed modules going forward.  You're welcome to have this bone to chew on as you like, but you, and the similarly storage limited would be better served making the case with ED to revoke the non-default livery install requirement, because then you're getting *all* of that storage back, not just from the Tomcat- but everything current, and all the big liveries from new modules going forward.

You want storage savings, there's your savings.  

[lunaticfringe]

6 minutes ago, freehand said:

So am I thinking correctly if you do not own the tomcat you use 12gb of space ? for the tomcat.

Yep.  You can delete them, and the game will apply a default livery (ie, it knows how to work without the extras), but they'll be re-downloaded during the next update.  

The key is that DCS knows it can run without all but the default livery, but they're considered a core requirement for installs currently. 

Edited October 31, 2022 by lunaticfringe

[DSplayer]

26 minutes ago, XCNuse said:

The Viper was released half a year later; is plenty high quality in texture clarity and resolution.

it has 51 liveries; 10 less than the F-14

 

and yet: (it's less than 4.5GB en total)

 

You don't count then, because you are quite literally 100% on board with downloading and looking at other extremely oversized textures. You are more unique in this situation than someone like myself.

If HB offered even higher resolution skins... you would download them; and you probably wouldn't complain you had to do that either?

 

I'm still letting it sink in that 14% of DCS in a vanilla state is the F-14, and that doesn't even require ownership.

This is not a skewed view.

This is exactly what is offered when people download DCS and are greeted with the incredibly loud menu music for the first time.

 

You're being selfish, and telling customers, ED's customers, and othe rthird parties potential customers, to go buy larger drives, for something you've done....

Nobody else, including ED has a singular flying module that consumes over 7GB

My background in making liveries/skins for this game allows me to understand the complexity between skins. Like I can tell the difference between a completely unique skin compared to a minor modifications like what a portion of those 51 or so F-16 liveries are comprised of.

 

Also it looks like you're counting both the files within CoreMods and Mods so if we're going by that metric, the Mirage F1 and the AH-64D take up over 7 GBs of space on your DCS installation disk. Within the F-14 Mods folder, you get Campaigns, Instant Action Missions, Training Missions, Singleplayer Missions, the F-14 Soundtrack, unencrypted sounds (which is super nice compared to what ED did), cockpit textures (both RIO and Pilot), the F-14 Manual, and other stuff to make the plane actually work in-game. This can be directly compared to the F-16 which has less campaigns, less missions overall (including Instant Action and Singleplayer Missions), smaller manual, and less smaller cockpit (you don't have 2 people and basically 2 different cockpits).

 

Going back to liveries, there is no doubt that 11.7 GB of storage is larger than what other aircrafts' livery folders but the Tomcat liveries have legit more files, generally more higher quality images (4096x4096 pixels), and more complex color work with results in a higher storage usage. Compared to largest F-16 skin in the CoreMods folder (the 36th Fighter Squadron skin), 37 files that make up the livery's 529 MBs uncompressed file size which is an average of ~14.297 MBs per file with 24 of those files being 4096x4096 pixels with the rest being smaller. Compared to the largest F-14 skin (the VF-211 Fighting Checkmates 100 (2001) skin), it has 41 files that total to 597 MBs uncompressed with an average of ~14.561 MBs per file with ~25 of those files being 4096x4096 pixels with the rest being smaller. The smallest F-16 skin (any of the HAF skins) has 1 file that is 10.6 MBs uncompressed in size that is 4096x4096. The smallest F-14 skin (the Santa skin for the F-14B) has 6 files for a total of 118 MBs uncompressed with an average of ~19.66 MBs per file with 5 of those files being 4096x4096.

 

If you were to calculate based on files alone for all the F-16 liveries, there are 521 livery files (not including the luas only stuff like DDS or TGA files) for the F-16 with an uncompressed size of 7.86 GBs while there are 1354 files for the F-14 liveries totaling in an uncompressed size of 18.9 GBs. That's an average of ~10.21 files per F-16 livery and ~22.20 files per F-14 livery.

[Lt_Jaeger]

I have no idea what you guys are talking about, the only part I get are skins. 

 

Skins - I want, gimme gimme. Most loved one is the one of what 10 made by someone in our squad, with my name on. 

I'm even happy for sandman simulation putting additional skins in his campaign, because it looks odd to have the exact same skin on every plane in the flight. 

So if the question is, are there enough, then the answer is no. 

Do I enjoy download huge amounts of GB during updates, nope, but only because it keeps me for quite a while from enjoying the new content. 

Let it rest, and ask ED to implement a "file manager" / "livery manager" of some sort. 

[Despayre]

4 hours ago, XCNuse said:

I'm leaving this discussion then with the statement that the F14 being 14% of DCS' vanilla installation size is ... absolutely not trivial.

 

Now you're just whining. Yes, your ridiculous 19Gb is trivial. BEYOND trivial. 

 

Again, a good SSD drive is about 100 bucks for 2TB. Ergo your 19Gb crisis, works out to cost you 95 cents... you've wasted more electricity on this forum complaining about it than the space it consumes actually costs.

[tomcat_driver]

On 10/29/2022 at 2:46 PM, XCNuse said:

The fact that even IronMike here is saying that storage "isn't that big of a deal anymore," shows exactly the problem; and the fact that I now have to prioritize other purchases.

Which means that I will be prioritizing a purchase on not their product instead.

+1

@IronMike

Why not offering all the crazy Tb skins as a separate package? This way you don't force everybody to share your views on how "cheap" storage has become.

Edited October 31, 2022 by tomcat_driver

[Despayre]

39 minutes ago, tomcat_driver said:

+1

@IronMike

Why not offering all the crazy Tb skins as a separate package? This way you don't force everybody to share your views on how "cheap" storage has become.

 

Because it doesn't make sense to force changes for the majority, for a few who want something else. Especially when an existing solution is already available for those few that have issues with the size. You can delete those skins yourself. There is no problem here, and no one is "forcing" anyone to share any views on how cheap storage factually is.

[IronMike]

59 minutes ago, tomcat_driver said:

+1

@IronMike

Why not offering all the crazy Tb skins as a separate package? This way you don't force everybody to share your views on how "cheap" storage has become.

 

Because it is not possible. ED needs to implement a livery manager, and until then we will offer what we offer, because the vast majority of our customers want that.

I cannot say this often enough, we are well within the average of what the industry standard is, and well within completely acceptable limits, not only for simming, but the gaming industry in general. That has nothing to do with forcing views. It was an explanation. A HOTAS is fairly expensive in comparison - should we dumb down the flight model so that folks can fly with keyboard and mouse instead? It is a preposterous proposition.

Sims require a significant amount of investment to be played, such is the nature of sims. The least of said investment is disk space. But be that how it may - we do what we do to offer both quality and quantity to our customers. We will continue to push boundaries in simming. This is not debatable, and never will be. Full stop.

This discussion over 15GB, in the year 2022, has been going on long enough. It is ok if some disagree, but they are a tiny minority, and managing their disk space is not on us, but on them. The solution is also not one that we can provide, but ED. In fact, we will add more skins - as has been the plan all along, and which is also acceptable as we will offer ultimately not one, but four aircraft variants. 

We will not change our approach and force the vast majority to deal with extra downloads, lack of conformity, etc etc, so that the smallest minority can have it their way. And everyone needs to accept that please, whether they agree or disagree. Because what is being asked here is to inconvenience thousands of our customers to accommodate a handful of people.

I am sorry if that disappoints some, but this has quite frankly been wasting our time long enough now. If anyone would like to see liveries as optional downloads, please address ED to create a livery manager for DCS, and we will be most happy to follow suit.

The topic and matter is closed for us - please do not start new ones. We heard your input, we heard your arguments, and the answer is and will continue to be no. Unfortunately we cannot make everyone happy. Thank you for your kind understanding. 

Edited October 31, 2022 by IronMike