How to significantly reduce the F-14’s Liveries folder size

[Skuva]

Abstract

In this article I explain how to reduce the F-14’s Liveries folder size by 2.4GB (-18%) and perhaps more, with zero impact on quality and possible positive impact on performance and loading times, by disposing duplicates and unused files. I also present other ideas on how Heatblur can further reduce the folder size. At the end I’m posting my version of the folder with most of the work done.

 

Introduction

A good portion of the community is aware of how big the F-14 liveries folder is. Sizing at 13.5GB, it dwarfs the second place, the Mirage F1 at 3.5GB. Comprising almost 10% of the entire base game size. The F-14 sure have a lot of liveries, and they all look of incredible quality. But this is not the sole reason for the files being this big. Whoever got in charge of making and organizing the liveries made excessive use of duplicates, and also left many undesired/unused assets behind.

When a livery is similar to another, it will in many situations have parts that look exactly the same (eg.: Helmets, Pylons, Pilot uniforms, etc). The livery creator will normally copy an already existing livery containing all the assets they require and modify on top of it. But they most of the times end up not modifying all of the assets, leaving many of these assets as exact copies of the original livery, while also not properly configuring the description.lua file.

The description.lua is a file present in each livery folder, responsible for telling the game which one of the assets that specific livery will use in place of the Default aircraft livery (normally a plain and boring gray one).

The description.lua contains lines like this:

{"HB_F14_EXT_01", 0 ,"HB_F14_EXT_01",false};

{"HB_F14_EXT_01", 1 ,"HB_F14_EXT_01_Nrm",false};

{"HB_F14_EXT_01", 13 ,"HB_F14_EXT_01_RoughMet",false};

This will tell the game to use the asset of name “HB_F14_EXT_01.dds” for the diffuse texture, the one with the paint, numbers and all the beautiful drawings. Then to use “HB_F14_EXT_01_Nrm.dds” as the normal map for that texture, dictating the illusion of depth in the material. And to use “HB_F14_EXT_01_RoughMet.dds” as the specular map, dictating how the surface reflects light, giving its shininess.

Although, in the situations where the creator decides to reuse an unchanged asset from another livery, it is not required to have a copy of that asset in their new livery. It is possible, through the description.lua, to call that asset from the parent livery during the game’s loading. In our example was the creator willing to reuse the normal and specular maps while only changing the painting the lines would be:

{"HB_F14_EXT_01", 0 ,"HB_F14_EXT_01",false};

{"HB_F14_EXT_01", 1 ," ../Livery name/HB_F14_EXT_01_Nrm",false};

{"HB_F14_EXT_01", 13 ," ../../Variant/Livery name/HB_F14_EXT_01_RoughMet",false};

In this case, the game will use the newly created diffuse texture. While importing the normal map from another livery in the same directory. And importing the specular map from a livery in the directory of a different variant of the aircraft.

This functionality exists for the purpose of optimizing liveries size, and reducing memory allocation, that means instead of your graphics card holding a bunch of copies of an asset it holds just one and applies it to all the objects in scene demanding that asset.

Some of the F-14’s liveries make proper use of this function, but the majority of them don’t. This could be because multiple individuals worked on the liveries, without complete knowledge of each other’s work, different philosophies or simply applying different levels of care. Some make use of assets that are already present in multiple other liveries. Others leave assets inside the liveries folders that aren’t being called by any of the description.lua’s, which means no one will ever see those while playing.

This work is separated as follow. In Section 1, it is presented how was my process of finding duplicates and undesired assets. In Section 2, a simple benchmark is used to roughly illustrate how this problem can affect the player negatively. In Section 3, I grumble about inconsistencies on Heatblur’s work and propose ideas to tackle those and reduce liveries size even more. In Section 4 there is a detailing of my findings for each livery. along with a link to download my version of the Liveries folder, in case anyone want to check my work and claims. Files are not available anymore, check 

 

1.    My method for finding duplicates

Spoiler

I first started by taking a closer look to those families of liveries that are similar but with different number and drawings (eg.: VF-11 101/103/106), and searching inside the zips for files with the exact same size. With this I could clearly see it was possible to optimize them and started thinking on doing it on a bigger scale.

For that I then begin unziping all the liveries. Then opening those folders in CMD and using the following command to zip each asset individually:

FOR %i IN (*.*) DO 7z.exe a "%~ni.zip" "%i"

Then searching for all the new individual zips for those with the exact same deflated size. This allowed me to find the majority of the duplicates. For each potential zip duplicate found, I compared the original files parameters, while also giving visual inspections for sanity check. To make sure those where really copies down to the 0’s and 1’s.

Unused assets were found by initially comparing number of active lines in description.lua’s with the respective livery asset count. Then in case of discrepancy looking for which assets were missing from the lua file.

 

2.    Benchmark

Spoiler

I built a simple benchmark mission to measure and compare loading time, performance and video memory consumption. The mission features 6x F-14A using different liveries each (VF-11 101/103/106, VF-301 104/111/113). Measurements are taken by recording the loading screen and then from the starting position of the camera, zooming out a bit to include all aircraft in view.

F-14_textures_test.miz

Hardware used: i5-13600K Stock, 64GB RAM 3200mhz cl16, SSD 1TB KC3000.

Game settings:

5 runs were made for each the Default files and my Optimized files, eliminating flukes (1 or 2 of each). Complete restart of the system on each run.

Loading screens took fewer frames for Optimized consistently (about a third of a second total).

VRAM usage differs by about 100MB right at start (very consistently). After some time, the game attempts to purge all unused assets, then difference increase by an average of 800mb (significant variation between tests). Coincidentally the total size of the liveries used in the mission differ by 850mb.

There was no measurable difference in FPS. But there could be a difference in systems with less VRAM.

Some of these results should be taken with salt, as they can have big margins of error, like the post purge values. Better conclusions would require extensive testing.

 

3.    Grumbling

Spoiler

3.2.          Standardization

Most assets have mipmaps but some don’t (eg.: VF-301 ND113 Tail).

Some liveries use different compression quality (eg.: Rogue Nation use 7zip’s Ultra preset, while Vandy use Normal). Most of them use normal. Having them all at the same compression quality as Rogue Nation reduce total file size by another 70MB. Which isn’t much and would make no difference in-game, but it is always nice to have things follow a pattern inside a project of this scale.

Some assets got saved in different DDS containers that for some reason became way bigger than every other similar asset (eg.: VX-4 helmets, are bigger than all other helmets, but with same resolution and quality)

Also noticed how some liveries might have high resolution nrm/spec, while in others the same part might have lower. Eg.: Pilot_suit_nrm’s range from 1K to 4K, and the 4K ones aren’t new, they are copies of the Default (which is 1K) with different badges, upscaled to 16x the size using simple upscaling methods that offer negligible benefits and, in some cases, can generate ugly artifacts.

And differently from the diffuse textures that high resolution might be necessary to get that crispy detailed look, normal and specular maps do not require that much. From some quick testing downscaling a sample I could see that going beyond 2K for nrm/spec hits the point of diminishing returns, and even 2K from 1K is really hard to notice a difference in quality in many situations. There are even some cases in which a 1K map can look much more detailed than a 2K, eg.: the 14B’s VF-32 helmet_nrm (Left) compared to most others (Right)

Some Liveries use the same texture but with different roughmets. Like if the ground chief spilled his moisturizer before flight and part of the aircraft became shinier than the other livery with the exact same appearance. Also, sometimes same textures use different normals that don’t fit in one of them, making it clear the creator forgot to change it.

Some liveries use files identical to the Default assets in Textures folder. In this case the creator should either not add a new line to description.lua or make such line as True and erase the unnecessary assets.

Again, these problems could arise from different creators with different brains. Some cared to go the efficiency route, others went “Yolo, I’m gonna 4K everything”. Some cared to properly save the files in an efficient format/container and do an efficient compression, whiles others didn’t.

I have strong reasons to believe if Heatblur would standardize this process they could easily cut another big chunk of the total size.

3.2.          Details for the sake of details

Some aspects of Heatblur’s attention to details seems to go beyond reason, apart from the previous mention of assets being upscaled for the sake of making numbers bigger. There is a lot of situations I found textures, normals and roughmets that look 99% the same except for a tiny group of pixels here and there like in the example below:

Helmets from Redrippers (14A), vf-74 adversary/bedevilers, vf-143, vf-211 differs by a few tiny smudges around pixel coordinates 910x1180.

This example is for a diffuse texture that someone with a good eye and knowing exactly where to look maybe could tell the difference, but for anyone else who is unaware it is impossible and it shouldn’t make a difference in perceived quality if they all used the same texture. Things get even more unnoticeable with normals and roughmets, the later not only requiring the knowledge of the difference but also observing it at specific angles against light (eg.: F-14B’s VF-32 and F-14A’s VF-211 Wing_roughmets).

Heatblur could save another big chunk of space by overlooking arguably non-perceivable details and making better use of assets. With this some may argue those very tiny details are what make the F-14’s liveries so good (along with the mentality that every asset should be as high resolution as possible), and that Heatblur needs to do it like this to achieve a high-quality module.

This argument not only implies every other module liveries are of significant inferior quality for not going this route, but also that a considerable amount of the liveries in the F-14 are of significant inferior quality. Which could make one question “Why have those lower quality ones in the first place, if they have such compromises that supposedly would negatively impact perceived quality?”

3.3.          Use Decals like everyone else?

This one comes with a question mark, because here is where it completely departs from my understanding, thus I can only make assumptions on some basic logic.

Most modules in the game make use of Decals, which is a technique to change small details in an object’s texture without having to make an entire new texture. Like when you shoot the ground and make a hole, the hole is a decal placed on top of the texture, otherwise you would need to have another entire texture of the ground with the hole painted at that exact location and when shot the game would swap the texture of the entire map just to show you that hole.

Older modules than the F-14 make use of Decals to change many things, like numbers, drawings, text, or other small details that could well fit inside a Windows 95 desktop icon. But for some still confusing-to-me reason, Heatblur refuses to use it.

I’ve read from a user on reddit (Cobra8472) said to be one of the 3D modelers from Heatblur, and he went to explain me that Decals drastically increase the number of drawcalls in-game, having great impact on performance.

Which is a weird claim when you consider the other modules using decals don’t perform with such bad performance as this statement made seem. So, what could be different in the F-14 that prevents them from doing it? Maybe some specific liveries require much more decals than other modules? Maybe a new UV mapping/unwrapping would be required, taking time of development?

Anyway, on that same discussion Cobra8472 claimed they are planning on doing it, given the number of complaints. I decided to keep this subsection because this is still not a reality and I’m not acquainted with the company enough to know who works in it and what they are working on, to take comments on reddit as absolute truth.

 

4.       The Specifics

Spoiler

Disclaimer: Have in mind all the info here and the examples I gave in previous sections aren’t all there is. Certainly, some duplicates went under my radar. And I limited myself to only giving few examples for each problem, because it relies much more on mk1 eyeballs and I’m tired.

As I started fixing the liveries in alphabetical order, my description.lua’s at some point started getting quite convoluted with more cross-referencing of assets than I would like. I imagine someone with deeper knowledge of the module and its liveries can do a much better job than me.

The section goes through each livery categorizing its problems as:

“Duplicates” = copied files between the same family of liveries eg.:

“Shared” = copied files from other families of liveries

“Comments” = things I decided to leave it be, because I wasn’t 100% certain.

 

In cases where there is only the name of the asset should be implied also nrm and roughmet included, unless otherwise specified. Eg.: Helmet = Helmet.dds + Helmet_nrm.dds + Helmet_roughmet.dds

In cases with “=” means inside that same livery there are assets that are copies of one another but different names. Like for many wing_roughmet that use the dedicated Left and Right assets that are identical.

Link for my version of the folders:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1dHsvBQDCz47g7yoNy_yc2Mk_mxH2Z-y0?usp=drive_link

 

4.1.         F-14A

Rogue Nation

Duplicates:

Wing_left_roughmet = Wing_right_roughmet

 

Top Gun 114

Duplicates:

Wing_left_roughmet = Wing_right_roughmet

Unused:

EXT_RIO_Suit, EXT_TCS_roughmet, EXT_droptank

Comment:

Wing_left_roughmet, Pylons_01_roughmet and Phoenixpylons_roughmet seems identical to the Default.

 

VF-1

Duplicates:

Wing_left_roughmet = Wing_right_roughmet

 

VF-11 (1998)

Duplicates:

All Nrm and RoughMet.

Droptank; Intakeramps; Lau_7; Pylons_01; Phoenixpylons; Pilot, Helmet; TCS.

Tail_nrm and Wing_left_roughmet = Wing_right_roughmet, duplicates from Top Gun 114 (14A).

Unused:

RIO_Helmet = Pilot_helmet, EXT_TCS_RoughMet.

Comment:

Tail_roughmet looks identical to Default.

 

VF-11 Red Rippers

Duplicates:

Wing_left_roughmet = Wing_right_roughmet

Shared:

Helmet and Lau_7 with VF-111 and VF-154 and VF-21 and Vf-211 (105)

Unused:

Helmet_Nrm and Helmet_Roughmet

 

VF-14

Duplicates:

Droptanks (AJ201/202/206); Pilot and pylons_01 and phoenixpylons (AJ200/201/202/206); RIO_Helmet (200)= Pilot_Helmet (202/206) = RIO_Helmet (202/206); TCS (200=201 and 202=206)

 

VF-21

Duplicates:

RIO_helmet = Pilot_Helmet

Shares:

Helmet with redrippers

Unused:

All Nrm/RoughMet; RIO_helmet; And a.dds ?

 

VF-31 1991

Duplicates:

Aim-54; Droptank; Pilot; Pylons_01; Lau_7; RIO_Helmet = Pilot_helmet; EXT_05; TCS; EXT_03/04_RoughMet; TF30; LOD1; Wings_roughmet; Tail_nrm.

Unused:

Droptank_RoughMet; Pylons_RoughMet; Lau_7_RoughMet;

 

VF-31 1988

Duplicates:

All Nrm and RoughMet; Droptank; Intake; Lau; Pylons; Pilot; Pilot_Helmet; Suit; RIO_Helmet; TCS; Mainlanding_gear; Tail_Nrm and _Roughmet; Wings_Roughmet (L = R);

Shared:

EXT_01/02/03/04 Tail Wings “_roughtmet” and “_nrm” with VF-11 (1998). Droptank Intake Lau_7 PhoenixPylons Pylons_01 Pilot TCS Suit “_nrm” with VF-11 (1998).

Unused:

Pylon_01_RoughMet (204); EXT_TCS_RoughMet.

 

VF-32/33

Duplicates:

aim7_roughmet; Tail_Nrm; Wing_Roughmet (R = L);

 

VF-41

Duplicates:

RIO_helmet = Pilot_Helmet (100); Pylons_01 (102/104); Pilot (100/102).

Shared:

EXT_01/02/03/04 and tail “_roughtmet” and “_nrm” with VF-14 AJ200

Comments:

RIO_helmet (100) has slightly different roughmet, although it has the same diff and nrm as pilot.

 

VF-111

Duplicates:

Shared:

EXT_01/02/03/04 Wings Tail “_roughmet” and Lau Pylon TCS Helmet with redripper;

Unused:

Helmet Nrm and Rough

 

VF-154

Shared:

Lau_7 and Helmet with VF-111;

Unused:

Helmet “_Nrm” and “_Rough”

 

VF-211 105

Duplicates:

RIO_helmet = Pilot_Helmet

Shared:

Helmet with redripper

Unused:

Helmet Nrm and Rough; RIO_helmet

Comment:

Wing_left_roughmet only differs from the Default by a tiny smudge

 

VF-301

Duplicates:

Aim-54; EXT_02_Nrm (111/113 and 101/104); EXT_04_Roughmet (111/113), EXT_05; Droptank_roughmet; Lau_7_roughmet ; Droptank (104/111/113); Lau_7 (104/111/113); 54pylon and pylon (104/111/113); 54pylon and pylon rough (111/113); Pilot; Helmet; RIO Helmet = PHelmet; Suit; Tail Nrm; Tail Rough (111/113); TCS (111/113); LOD1 rough (111/113); TF30; Wing rough (111/113);

EXT_01_nrm (104/111)

Shared:

Wing_roughmet and Pilot and Pylons_01 and PhoenixPylons_roughmet(111) with VF-31 1991; Tail_roughmet with VF-31 1991 (205); TF30 nrm rough with VF-31 1991 (200); Tail_nrm with VF-31 1991 (200)

Unused:

EXT_05; Drop rough; Lau rough; pylon rough (111/113)

Comments:

104 and 111/113 share the same diffuse pylons, but 104 has different roughmet.

 

4.2.          F-14B

Rogue Nation

Duplicates:

Wing_rough R=L

Shares from F-14A’s Rogue Nation:

Droptank Intake PhoenixPylon_diff; Helmet_nrm_maverick = Helmet_nrm (F-14A). Helmet_roughmet. Suit; TCS_light_gull_gray; HGU-33_maverick;

Helmet_nrm_clean from vf-32 (14A)

Comments:

PhoenixPylon and TCS uses the same diff as F-15A but with different rounghmet. Pilot_Helmet and HGU-33_maverick are effectively the same thing (Reverify!), but weirdly with different file sizes (same for nrm rough), while in the F14A they are actually different.

 

Top Gun

Duplicates:

Wing_rough R=L

Shares from F-14A’s Top Gun:

EXT_03/04_rough; Lau; PhoenixPylons; EXT_Pilot and nrm; SUIT; Pylons_01; Tail_rough/nrm; TCS_roughmet; Wing_rough;

Unused:

EXT_TCS_roughmet; EXT_droptank; RIO_suit

Comments:

PhoenixPylon and TCS uses the same diff as F-15A but with different rounghmet.

 

VF-32

Duplicates:

Helmet Suit Tail (101/102/103)

Comment:

Wing_left_roughmet only differs from the default by a tiny smudge

 

VF-74

Duplicates:

Helmet nrm/rough; Suit

 

 

VF-101

Duplicates:

Helmet nrm/specs; Suit ; Helmet dark/grim

Comment:

Red has a pratically similar Helmet, but with a tiny different smudge at the front along the black line.

 

VF-102

Duplicates:

Suit

 

VF-103 Sluggers

Duplicates:

Helmet Suit (206/207)

 

VF-142

Shared:

Helmet nrm/rough and Suit from VF-103 sluggers

 

VF-143

Shared:

VF-74’s, 211, 143 (1995), 101’s all share the helmet_nrm and helmet_roughmet

Duplicated:

Pilot_suit (low vis)

 

VF-211

Shared:

Helmet_normal from redrippers (14B). Pilot_suit from redrippers (14B). Helmet from redrippers(14A).

Comment:

Same helmet for RIO and P, but non-sense different normal map?

VF-74’s, 211, 143, 101’s all share the helmet_nrm and helmet_roughmet

 

VX-4

Shared:

Tail_roughmet/nrm Pylons_01_roughmet Phoenixpylons Lau_7_roughmet with top gun 14A

Unused:

RIO_Suit and pilot_suit_roughmet

 

VX-9 vampires

Duplicates:

RIO = P Helmet

 

VX-9 Vandy

Duplicates:

Wing_rough R=L

Shared:

Wing_left_nrm with vandy 14A

Wing_left_roughmet appears to be the same as the default in Texture folder.

Unused:

Droptank_roughmet

Comments:

EXT_03/04_nrm looks identical to Vandy 14A, but different sizes.

 

Conclusions

Spoiler

We’ve seen how there is a way for Heatblur to reduce the Liveries folder size significantly with no compromises and with little effort, considering I managed it in an afternoon someone with deeper knowledge might be able to do it in less than an hour.

It is possible for Heatblur, with some effort, further reduce size by standardizing their creation process. The philosophy on livery quality of the creators presents inconsistencies and in some cases negligence. If Heatblur wants to be the third party with the most numerous and detailed liveries, they should also be the ones most concerned about how their livery development and file management can affect not only their customers, but also all the other players that do not own the module, thus aren’t even benefiting from their creation.

To be clear, almost everything in this article is not unique of Heatblur, most modules (if not all) suffer from these problems to some extent. But the F-14 is by far the worst offender. I’m willing to look into other modules because I believe, after finding some problems in other modules too, it is possible to prune some extra GB’s from the base game install.

I hope the upcoming F-4 Phantom won’t suffer from these problems, given their team is certainly more experienced now than they were years ago.

And to end my point, my motivation for doing all this isn’t simply to save a few gigabytes of space on my SSD. It is to express my concern to a habit that can easily set a bad precedent among third parties and even ED, leading to more and more problems regarding the game’s optimization, and hardware requirements that can become a big wall scaring potential newcomers or preventing part of the playerbase from keep enjoying their simulator, regardless of some folks beliefs of “just buy more ssd, it’s cheap”, or “everyone should have a dedicated SSD for DCS”, or even “8GB VRAM is not enough for DCS, buy new GPU”.

 

Edited June 10 by Skuva

[YSIAD_RIP]

Hi @Skuva good points.  Also, if you have not done so already, try to take a look at the Optomized Core Thread from TAZ0014 where he makes suggestions and also provides files to replace the bloated ones in other modules similar to your discussion.

• Hope that the ED Developers are monitoring these threads and take advantage of the optimizations suggested here and in your thread. 

Cheers.   

 

[RustBelt]

You’re doing gods work.

[Skuva]

16 hours ago, YSIAD_RIP said:

Hi @Skuva good points.  Also, if you have not done so already, try to take a look at the Optomized Core Thread from TAZ0014 where he makes suggestions and also provides files to replace the bloated ones in other modules similar to your discussion.

• Hope that the ED Developers are monitoring these threads and take advantage of the optimizations suggested here and in your thread. 

Cheers.   

 

I had totally forgot about Taz's work. I've been using his files for the Mi-24P since release.

What he did to the F-14 liveries basically proves my points in section 3. He went on downscaling most of the assets that have no reason being 4K down to 2K (and 2K to 1K), and just like that he cut down the liveries folder from 13.5GB to 8.8GB, and he didn't even got rid of the duplicates/unused. I believe mixing his work with mine it can come down to the 7.X GBs.

His liveries still look as crisp as the originals, because he left all the necessary 4K difuse as 4K and only downscaled for the smaller parts (like pilot suit and Helmets) and normals/roughmets. And we can play "spot the difference" all day here comparing his work with the originals, and I bet no one will be able to guess which is which most of the times.

Edited January 22, 2024 by Skuva

[Mach3DS]

If you try to change the specific Liveries to use "standard" Roughmets or other textures you will ruin the overall look of the aircraft.  I can only speak for myself, but my liveries are custom made, with custom Roughmets, Normals and Diffuse.  I made the VF-301 livery.  If the Tail doesn't have MipMaps, that's just an error that I didn't catch, as my default export is to have MipMaps autogenerated.  I think your premise is wrong.  No offense intended.  But many of the high quality liveries are because they DO NOT use standard cookie cutter textures.  So custom textures which were added, may increase the size from default textures in order to introduce higher resolution imagery or new imagery )like normals that don't exist in the default for example), for increased detail over stock items.  Not all liveries are like that.  But some are.  Generally the passion projects for the livery artists will have much more detail.  If you were to replace all the RM from the liveries I made, for example, you would destroy the overall final finished look of the aircraft since mine were made with specific Roughmets that contains the additional details present in the normals and the albedo.  Along with adjusted albedo colors to support the Roughmets that were created for them.  For example, NONE of mine use generic CIC patterns or weathering patterns.  All of them are unique and based on photos of the real aircraft with as similar weathering patterns as can be achieved from historic record.

 

Edited January 23, 2024 by Mach3DS

[Skuva]

2 hours ago, Mach3DS said:

If you try to change the specific Liveries to use "standard" Roughmets or other textures you will ruin the overall look of the aircraft.  I can only speak for myself, but my liveries are custom made, with custom Roughmets, Normals and Diffuse.  I made the VF-301 livery.  If the Tail doesn't have MipMaps, that's just an error that I didn't catch, as my default export is to have MipMaps autogenerated.  I think your premise is wrong.  No offense intended.  But many of the high quality liveries are because they DO NOT use standard cookie cutter textures.  So custom textures which were added, may increase the size from default textures in order to introduce higher resolution imagery or new imagery )like normals that don't exist in the default for example), for increased detail over stock items.  Not all liveries are like that.  But some are.  Generally the passion projects for the livery artists will have much more detail.  If you were to replace all the RM from the liveries I made, for example, you would destroy the overall final finished look of the aircraft since mine were made with specific Roughmets that contains the additional details present in the normals and the albedo.  Along with adjusted albedo colors to support the Roughmets that were created for them.  For example, NONE of mine use generic CIC patterns or weathering patterns.  All of them are unique and based on photos of the real aircraft with as similar weathering patterns as can be achieved from historic record.

 

 

I'm not advocating for all liveries to use the Default roughmet, just those that are already using a perfect copy of it, or the ones that change way too little (like in the example given in 3.2). The VF-301 is suficiently different to justify having its own roughmets.

For the VF-301 my concern is, why so many duplicates? Like if all use the same helmet, why not have just one of them (ND101) carry the helmet files, and edit the others (ND104/111/113) to call those files through description.lua? {"HB_F14_EXT_PILOT_HELMET", 0 ,"../VF-301 ND101 HiVis/HB_F14_EXT_PILOT_HELMET",false}; would do the trick. It reduces the size, and if there is more than one aircraft in mission/server using those liveries it actually saves on memory.

Regarding resolution, big parts like EXT_01/02/03/04, Tail and Wings make sense to use 4K diffuse, but 4K normal/roughmet becomes debatable, and for smaller parts like the phoenixpylons even the 4K diff stops making sense. As I said, this is something that could be settled by putting side by side (4K vs 2K) and trying to guess which is which.

Please, take a look at the VF-301 part in Section 4, there is a lot to improve. I'm not sure if the VF-301 came first, or the others using similar assets, but it sure shares a lot of identical assets to other families of liveries. And adding to the list I just found the TF30 diff is a copy of the Default one at "Coremods/aircraft/F14/Textures/A". So this makes really hard to believe the VF-301 is entirelly made of 100% new assets.

Edited January 23, 2024 by Skuva

[draconus]

So maybe cockpit textures also need a look?

On 1/21/2024 at 5:38 PM, Skuva said:

...all the other players that do not own the module, thus aren’t even benefiting from their creation.

They can by looking at Tomcats in MP or AI ones.

[RustBelt]

16 hours ago, average_pilot said:

I get the "being passionate" thing, but this specific module has been a source of performance headaches via inconsiderate abuse of video ram since release, a resource that, say more informed people than me, DCS is not great at managing.

To be fair, 5 years ago, the idea that top end cards would still be bumbling around with only 6-8GB of VRAM today was absurd. But here we are. Progress stumbles barely on.

Edited January 25, 2024 by RustBelt

[Bucic]

On 1/23/2024 at 6:52 PM, Mach3DS said:

If you try to change the specific Liveries to use "standard" Roughmets or other textures you will ruin the overall look of the aircraft.  I can only speak for myself, but my liveries are custom made, with custom Roughmets, Normals and Diffuse.  I made the VF-301 livery.  If the Tail doesn't have MipMaps, that's just an error that I didn't catch, as my default export is to have MipMaps autogenerated.  I think your premise is wrong.  No offense intended.  But many of the high quality liveries are because they DO NOT use standard cookie cutter textures.  So custom textures which were added, may increase the size from default textures in order to introduce higher resolution imagery or new imagery )like normals that don't exist in the default for example), for increased detail over stock items.  Not all liveries are like that.  But some are.  Generally the passion projects for the livery artists will have much more detail.  If you were to replace all the RM from the liveries I made, for example, you would destroy the overall final finished look of the aircraft since mine were made with specific Roughmets that contains the additional details present in the normals and the albedo.  Along with adjusted albedo colors to support the Roughmets that were created for them.  For example, NONE of mine use generic CIC patterns or weathering patterns.  All of them are unique and based on photos of the real aircraft with as similar weathering patterns as can be achieved from historic record.

 

There's no technological advancement resource abusers won't squander. That's a lesson from the last decade of computing. The more specific lesson since the release of F-14 is we need enforcement by ED as 'reasonable use' doesn't really speak to some.

[Shaman]

I have just found this thread. I wonder whether within a year time module developers have already implemented this optimization to their own set of liveries or they have not?

[Skuva]

As of today (10th june 2025) I'm not making my custom folder available anymore for the following reasons:

- I need space on my personal drives (cloud and physical). By this point I believe anyone who had interest in checking my work would/should have done so already.

- I don't care about DCS near as much I used to when I wrote this essay. Because in addition to all the problems and drama around the game, HB hasn't done anything about this issue yet, and even though they took some good measures regarding the F-4E it still has much of the same problems.

- ED is making the life of livery makers harder and harder. Even though I've been only messing with textures from older aircraft that are not being restricted like the newer ones, I feel like it is not productive to invest my time learning to do things in this game when there is a high probability of it being wasted in the future.

Edited June 10 by Skuva