This should probably be in a creator help forum, but I can't for the life of me find it (despite remembering having posted in it years ago), so hello there.

I made my first successful default replacement! At least it works for me and it all seems right in SimPE, but the filesize says 6,19 mb, which seems way too high for an AF-only DR with 3 RC's... For comparison, afbody_backpacker with 4 RC's by Lemonlion is only 828 kb!

It's afbody_dadatopjeans, supposedly replaced with Mortal Coil Evanesco Dress, made by Zerographic. I can't actually find the dress on Google using any part of that in my search, but it's what my folder name of the custom version claims, so I don't know what's going on with that either.

You have very large mostly blank textures in uncompressed format. If you use The Compressorizer, you can reduce the package size to 1.1 MB. I can't say if there is a better way of not including those normal maps that are blank, or reducing their size.

Oh, right! I completely forgot The Compressorizer existed. I deleted the blank bump maps as per a tutorial by skellington7d, but that only took my filesize from 1.2 to 1.1. I even tried extracting the texture files, compressorizing them seperately and them rebuilding them as DXT and re-compressorizing the package, just to try it. Same result, so I guess the compressorizer does that while it's in the package anyway. Not sure what else I can do to lower the file size :/

Edit: Actually, 1.1 mb isn't that bad, I guess. I looked through some more DR's by others and it seems to be within the scope of normal filesize for a single sex and age with a few RC's. Not the best but not bad either, it seems.

Thanks a lot for your help :D

Creator section is in (menu at the top) Sims 2 --> Modding. Click it, and from there you choose where your question fits best.

You can remove normal maps entirely from clothes by deleting the four "normal map" lines in the TXMTs, and also the normal map itself, for each texture you want to remove it for. If the normal map texture is just grey without any texture, there's no point in having it there.

The file size depends on how many textures are in the file, and also on the mesh (high-poly meshes will usually cause a somewhat larger filesize). If the file replaces multiple textures/outfits, it's common for it to have a larger filesize even when compressed.

An uncompressed 1024x1024 texture on its own can make files around 1 MB.