Livery selection tool is becoming a requirement; 30GB on all end-users and dediservers are JUST liveries.

[XCNuse]

Liveries are cool and all; but the system is clearly getting out of hand.

Heatblur's F-14 alone is consuming 1/3rd of this 30GB livery file blob, but they are requesting this be taken to ED and become a legitimate core feature going forward.

It is unnecessary that 30GB of files are on everyone's computer, and constantly growing with the release of new modules. And even more unnecessary that dediservers, which don't even have graphical support are required to have these files installed... legitimately unnecessary.

 

Drive space may "becoming cheap," but this is a ridiculous statement to be made directly to a customer to say "go buy this other product instead of our own." Legitimately... a ridiculous thing. 'Cheap' or not, it's still going to cost the same as an entire module for most people to replace their drive to fit ED on, and it will only become worse with the newer maps which are consuming abnormal amounts of storage as well.

 

This isn't like RAM where you can stick another chip into a slot and everything is hunky dory; the whole thing has to be replaced....

I've made another request as well to Nineline to make it so DCS can install maps on other drives so people can at least make better use of what storage space they do have. As right now, it's legitimately wasteful, to have to keep going up in entire drive sizes; while some of us may have other SSDs sitting here with nothing on them, but aren't large enough for DCS.

 

Returning to liveries however; I shouldn't be required to have 12GB of liveries for one jet on my drive, or 4.5GB for just the Apache.

This topic can quickly transition to VRAM, but we all know how expensive graphics cards are these days, and how poorly optimized DCS is when it comes to VRAM. So I won't go down that path.

 

 

All liveries should be OPTIONAL.

And liveries should NOT be required on dediserver installs.

 

There are legitimately complex and very advanced modern AAA games coming out even today that are under 30GB that have incredible open world experiences with tons of maps and fantastic textures....

Meanwhile, DCS's required external liveries is that size alone. Compressed or not; it is an unhealthy size for this game that is growing out of control storage space wise.

[Rudel_chw]

This subject was debated to death here:

 

 

was it really necessary to restart the same subject here as well? 

 

[XCNuse]

3 minutes ago, Rudel_chw said:

was it really necessary to restart the same subject here as well? 

It was legitimately requested, by IronMike, that it be here.

[Northstar98]

Yeah +1 on this, a livery manager is something I'd really appreciate.

There are many liveries I don't use and don't plan on using any time soon.

For some liveries I've also made some tweaks such that they're more appropriately and consistently formatted, sorted by country (looking at you MiG-21bis) and made easier to find. However, each time DCS updates or repairs, all of them get reinstated.

It doesn't take me lots of time to delete them again, but I'd much rather DCS ship with a minimal amount of stock liveries and then give me the option to download extra through the module manager.

[Exorcet]

I am absolutely for a livery manager. I think it would make sense as an extension of the module manager. Players would choose what liveries are downloaded with the module, and DCS would just use a generic livery when a plane is using a paint scheme that isn't downloaded.

17 hours ago, XCNuse said:

This isn't like RAM where you can stick another chip into a slot and everything is hunky dory; the whole thing has to be replaced....
 

Well on this it depends. Storage space can be easier to solve than RAM. If your space problem is that you have many files, you can just buy a USB external drive and move some over to it. You don't even need to turn off your PC to do this. If your drive it too small for DCS then fixing the issue is more involved though, yes.

[OpticFlow]

The liveries (texture) size also affects RAM usage in game. Hop on a populated server and DCS RAM usage exceeds 30 GB even on maps like Caucasus and PG which otherwise have modest RAM usage in single player.

[Bucic]

On 11/2/2022 at 9:03 AM, OpticFlow said:

The liveries (texture) size also affects RAM usage in game. Hop on a populated server and DCS RAM usage exceeds 30 GB even on maps like Caucasus and PG which otherwise have modest RAM usage in single player.

I doubt it stems from the size of liveries folders. Highly unlikely. But I agree, an asset selection tool is becoming more necessary.

[SharpeXB]

GB are nothing to worry about. Hard drives today are measured in TB and are very cheap. 
Actually the official livery files should be locked since removing or altering them can be a form of cheating. 

[SkateZilla]

Odd that you say dedicated server owners are being hit with 30GB of Liveries, 

When my Dedicated Server Build is < 14 GB Total.

I supposed you are running a DCS Normal Stable/OB Build as a Server instead of the Dedicated Server Build.