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Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#1 Old 1st Mar 2011 at 11:57 AM
Default Question about Filesize
I've only recently started recoloring and cloning, so I'm a novice in these things.
For testing purposes I've made a clone of a counter and pulled all the recolor-textures into it. That particular counter had 17 recolors!
Surprisingly, the cloned package turned out to be almost 2MB bigger than the counter and all its recolors summed up together.
How come?
I did a search and haven't found out much about the filesizes (if there mentioned at all) so I thought it would be save to ask the masters. I only hope this is the right forum for it.

Also, I could use a link for "directx manager" or whatever that's called, since I obviously need that to look at my packages in SimPE. When I click on preview, I'll get a warning that SimPE needs that. I do have DirectX 9.0, otherwise I think most of my games wouldn't run. I didn't know that there was some extra software involved.

Thanks in advance!
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Top Secret Researcher
#2 Old 1st Mar 2011 at 12:16 PM
Not sure what kind of testing you are doing, but if it involves having an actual working counter, you should use Numenor's Counter Clone Template.

I don't know anything about how sizes normally add up in packages. If you cloned a Maxis counter, it very likely drew in more than one counter, or at least pieces of more than one. It probably repeated the textures for each subset. It would appear that in this case, at least, getting all the recolors into one package is not a winning idea.

Retired from the Sims world. Please continue to enjoy my creations. Thank you to everyone who helped -- by either giving me the tools and knowledge to create or by encouraging me & downloading my creations. The Sims community is the BEST!
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#3 Old 1st Mar 2011 at 1:01 PM
Thanks for getting back to me so quickly!
I know about Numenor's Counter Templates and no, I didn't expect the counter to be actually working in game, I've read enough warning about that.
I cloned a custom counter based on Numenor's Template. I checked the number of TXTR (images) and there are 36, 2 for each state (dirty and clean) and two for the shadows, so that seems reasonable. There are 71 Material Definitions which makes sense to me since the counters come in two sets or however you call that (sorry, still trying to get the language (semantics?) right) Top and finish. But that's just code, isn't it? The main bulk of the packages should consist of the texture images, so how could the file get that big?
And, is there something I could do about it? like importing the images back and letting the DDS-Tools compress them?
This is propably getting too technical for this forum, so is there a better place to ask these questions?
One final question, though. You said:
"It would appear that in this case, at least, getting all the recolors into one package is not a winning idea."
Is there actually a case where this is a winning idea?
Top Secret Researcher
#4 Old 1st Mar 2011 at 1:33 PM
I have no idea if there are advantages to having the recolors all in one package. I'm really more of a builder -- the meshing & recolors I do are a means to the 'perfect' (as defined by whatever peculiar mood I'm in at the time) lot. So for me, I can get my lot package to its smallest by having the original mesh package as small as possible, and then having only the recolors I need.

I do like to recolor objects, and it seems that most of the objects with recolors built in, are either not recolorable, or are a pain to recolor because they carry a lot of extra baggage.

Things with a lot of morphs (like food) are often not practical to make recolorable. It might make sense to have several color variations in the package. I've never made food, and rarely include in lots. I don't know if it actually offers advantages.

There may be other viewpoints that see a big, complete with recolors package as an advantage. In general, I don't see advantages.

Depending upon what your long term goal is, the Modding Forum might be an option.

Retired from the Sims world. Please continue to enjoy my creations. Thank you to everyone who helped -- by either giving me the tools and knowledge to create or by encouraging me & downloading my creations. The Sims community is the BEST!
Me? Sarcastic? Never.
staff: administrator
#5 Old 1st Mar 2011 at 2:17 PM
For working with meshes in SimPE you need managed directx, link is on the SimPE site right where you downloaded SimPE.

For your "raw" clone of a counter, it's probably incredibly large in file size because none of the resources are compressed. I do believe Numenors counter templates are. This is done with the compressorizer by jfade, you should be able to find it via google. Compressing makes an enormous size difference in packages, it can take a package from several MB to several hundred kb.

By cloning a counter, you've probably looked at THE largest possible file in the game. LoL Counters have something like 5 meshes and each has 2 states for textures, and textures are what drive the kb size of your package up, up, up!

In regards to having all recolors in a package, generally it's not a good idea. Most downloaders have no idea how to remove excess colors from a package, but if you supply recolors in individual packages they can pick and choose. I've done this...once I think. Mostly to see if I could do it, rather thanshould I do it.

And moving to modding discussion. =)
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#6 Old 2nd Mar 2011 at 3:09 AM
Default So, here's where it ended up...
Thanks for answering - and moving this thread, although it's a bit more complicated to reply here. Luckily I subscribed to the thread or I wouldn't have found it again - at first I thought it got deleted for beeing out of place or something. But I thought that this was getting too up for "just" recolors.
In regards to your answer: Yeah, that was exactly why I've done it, to see if I could and look at the outcome. But I'm still confused:
The counter (custom) is based on numenor's template, it's so stated in the description. So the textures SHOULD be compressed. Did SimPE decompress them (is that the right word? I always felt that had something to do with submarines, lol) and put them as they are in my "raw" file? And did that with the recolors,too?
I did pick the counter for it's size, I thought differences would be most obvious to see.
So, am I right about the DDS-Tools? They compress the files, even the other sizes, right? So if I import the textures in again via "Build TXT" would the filesize shrink (again, I'm having different associations regarding "shrink"...)?
You know I should propably just try that out, and stop bothering you with unimportant questions.
Still, besides the unquestioned advantage for downloaders, has anyone ever dug into the loading behavior of the Sims Game in connection with filesize or even number of files? And is the conveniece for downloaders the only reason why it's handled like this? Or is my game more likely to crash or freeze while loading or whatever that stubborn game wants to do to make me pull my hair out...

Thank you for the information on "managed directx", I remember vaguely that they mentioned it. I just thought, since I really suck at meshing and don't intent to try it ever again, I wouldn't need it. Now I know better.
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