For those that do not know what the Sins Optimization Project is, please click the link below and some descriptions from their original post.
https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/378149
The project initially started out as an idea to reduce the texture sizes, and poly counts of some models. Not just arbitrary reductions. The goal was to maintain the quality of Sins in game. To look like nothing has been changed at all.
I studied the Particle files, and textures. Many of the particle textures IMO were also way to high resolution. A reduction by 1/2 showed no visible difference in game in most cases. There were some exceptions where it did effect the appearence in game, and those textures were left alone. Remember the goal was not to reduce in game quality. Also all of the particle textures were changed from TGA format to DDS format, because DDS uses far less memory, and is much more efficient. The particles also utilize the mip mapping features of DDS.
The developers mentioned something about a Memory Leak. I heard that a leak can be caused by a file calling for something over, and over again if it is not there. Example a mesh file calling for a texture that does not exist. Vanilla Sins has MANY particle, and mesh files that do that. I removed all of the redundant entries that pointed to non existent textures in the mesh, and particle files. I also removed the entries that have lines like "C;\gs\main\datasource\textures\effects\aura4.dds", and just put "aura4.dds". This will default the search to the mods texture folder, and speed things up. Also various typo's were corrected in some mesh, and particle files. Some ships have mesh nulls that were miss-spelled. For example the Akkan had typos on its engine nulls, and flairs. The engine trail, and flair didnt show up in game. the Marza was missing its bomb nulls. All of this has been corrected as well. If there is a ship mesh file in the mod then it had something wrong that was fixed. Regardless if this caused a memory leak, or not these errors had to be fixed.
After the Meshes, Particles, Textures, and the User Interface were optimized, and some very obvious bugs were fixed there was a tremendous boost in game performance. Sins ram usage was greatly reduced. As of version 0.07 no game i ran ever went above 1.5 gigs on Diplomacy with maximum settings. Including Bloom enabled. Tested on Huge random multi star maps with 9 AI's. The 2 gig crash problem is solved. Our primary goal with this project is achieved!
What I would like to know is how much of this has been transferred over into the 1.2 Beta patch? The community has, from a Mod standpoint, done a lot of down in the dirt work to make larger games playable reliably online. I would like to hope that this effort has been rewarded by being included in some part in the official patch. Already I have noted the 1.5gig 'observed max usage' comments from the 1.2 Beta and between the TSOP Mod being comparable. Has anyone looked in detail at a comparison between these two excluding game balance changes? Thoughts?
I fixed the 4 Diplomacy research sheets and GameLogo_Opening.tga and Relationships_PLACEHOLDER.tga that were wasting 22mb total. Now they're 3.41mb total. I will add lots more in the future.
These files should not effect multi-player and could probably go into the diplomacys textures folder in the install directory. No promises though.
PM me if you want the files. Not posting till after the patch. IC can do their own work.
@myfist
I'll wait. But if you want to contribute, why not send a download link of those files to yarlen?
I would wait until after the beta turns into an official released 'non-beta' patch. That way we don't have to have three or four different versions of files floating around. Keep it simple. Keep it safe.
Why do questions, or discussions about TSOP almost always degenerate into an LAA argument, or about some hack to increase ram usage instead of fixing a perfectly good, but broken game?
The quality of the textures in TSOP was NOT reduced. Only converted from TGA to DDS format. No ship, or planet textures were touched. Ridiculouly high resolutiion textures for the particles were reduced in size by 1/2, because there was no need for memory hogging 512, or 1024 res particle texture when a 256, or 128 resolution texture looked identical in game in every way. Even close up.
Ironclad will merge elements of TSOP into the 1.2 patch. This is confirmed. TSOP is an open community project. For this purpose is why TSOP was made. Which elements of TSOP Ironclad will use is their decision. Plus i will help them with any questions they ask about further optimizing the game at the graphic artist level.
I've played TSOP almost exclusively and you guys have not detracted from the Sins experience AT ALL. In fact, you have even fixed a couple of graphics.
The optional elements like reduced strike craft are just that--optional. The core TSOP is nothing but a plus.
How many people play with low quality settings to avoid late game lag then gripe about a not-even real "reduction in quality"?
Great work.
No, I am not a paid spokesperson (nor do i work on the project) but if you want to contribute cash I'm happy to link my PayPal
By-the-way...what type files are the *.window files in the screens and all? What is required to edit them?
*.window are just like all the rest of the reference files requiring notepad. They are text ways of telling a curtain portion of a window in-game like the bottom hud how big it will be and where it is on the screen and what brush to use. A brush is just a text link to a texture with coordinates and size.
Put me on the pay roll and not a problem.
Thanks--yep, you'll get your check right after I get mine.
Step aside... The guy that thought it all up, and took the initiative to do it is the 1st in line
Another note about the "graphic reductions" everyone seems to be so afraid of. The particle textures that were reduced in size were for graphics (the particles) in game that were extremely small to begin with. For example the Kol's guass gun effect (The 3 side guns. not the ability) is a very tiny effect in game. Yet it used a texture that was 64x64. When reduced to 32x32, and converted to DDS with mip mapping. There was absolutely no visible side effect, because the particle mesh used for the effect was scaled very small to begin with. The advent malace, and fighter push ability is another story. It uses a 512x64 texture for the hands (2 of them. One for the left, and one for the right hands). When reduced by half there indeed was a very visible difference in game. Same was true with the Vasari beam effects. So those textures were left alone with the exceptions of being converted to DDS. I personally tested each, and every effect i changed in TSOP to make sure there was no visible change in game from vanilla before i commited it.
We did change the planet textures early in TSOP's development. This did not reduce the resolution or the quality of the planet textures themselves, because in game the planets resolution is 2048x1024. However the planet texture is 2048x2048. UV mapped cylindrically at the equators, but planiar mapped at the poles to prevent the pole pinch effect of spherical UV mapping. The vanilla method wastes 1/2 of the planet textures space. We tried to redo the vanilla textures to 2048x1024 spherical maps. However we ran into the pole pinch problem ourselves, and we could not fix it. So we reverted the planets back to the vanilla cylindrical/planiar standard.
You dont have to take my word for it. Play vanilla, and play TSOP. Compare them for yourself. Almost 800 megs of in game memory savings cant be wrong. If there is a difference between Vanilla, and TSOP in graphic quality it is so minor that no one notices. Which was the whole point of the project.
Combine that with what Ironclad did for the 1.2 patch, and Sins will indeed become a lean, mean machine. With lots of room for expansion, and modding.
This is why we can't have nice things.
I still am not comfortable with reducing texture sizes.
First, do textures really make a difference in the system ram? wouldn't all the textures be on the g-card? if so, then I dont see this as addressing the issue where systems slow due to the 2gb limit. If that's not why you want to do this, but because not everyone has a spiffy g-card, then add the lower res textures to the lower video settings. IIRC, there are several texture resolution settings, so just stick the lower res textures in one of those settings, problem solved.
Second, just because you cant see a difference in certain textures doesnt mean someone else cant and/or future hardware might not make it very visible. There are plenty of old games that I play where certain textures were low resolution, and now when I play them those textures stick out and are very distracting because I am playing at resolutions way higher than the designers intended. Now, if all textures were of the same quality, then on the higher resolutions at least everything would look the same as opposed to certain things sticking out.
Third, I'd like to read the post where IC said they would integrate TSOP into the patch, can you send me a link?
P.S. If anything I say here comes off as instulting somehow, I'm sorry. I understand other's views on this subject, especially the mod makers who put in blood, sweat, and tears. I simply disagree, and am trying to help you understand my view.
First of there have been quite a few e-mails between myself and Blair Fraser and others and the Admin team concerning updates, ideas to fix things, and mention, talk, etc of the TSOP project. This was all part of the reason why a patch and a further expansion is even being revisited at all in the first place. Understand this point. The community never gave up on trying to enter into dialogue with the IC & Stardock boys (while most of the boards were in dispair with angry posts) and we continued to e-mail and eventually started to discuss things. The TSOP project is the focal point with which this whole revival of SINS owes it's respective thanks. It is the reason that people that loved it, never gave up trying to talk to IC and Stardock about revising the game to be more efficient.
I could pull the files if you REALLY don't believe me. Just ask around.
I would just like to note that when you convert textures from .tga to .dds ... you don't lose any quality or this or that and what not. There is not a difference. It is simply a different way to encode the same file and all that stuff. .dds are smaller files than .tga in memory usage and file size.
Secondly, if you have an object that was the size of a very small Ø0.25mm pin head but you had for that pin head a texture file that was roughly the square footage size of Texas or Montana ... there is ZERO visible change in shrinking that texture, it's simply not visible in the game. The game will not zoom in far enough to make any of that reduction visible, AT ALL.
If you really do not believe us please, take pictures at high resolution, zoom in as far as you can go in game (without using digital zoom post picture capture as this introduces artifacts and is not an acurate depiction of the picture any longer) and post them side by side and compare.
EVERYTHING that has been done has been aimed at MAINTAINING quality while REDUCING system load.
Not to offend but talk is cheap and the proof is in the pudding. If you really are this concerned about it, download the mod, enable it, and compare for yourself. Post up some screen shots. It won't mess up any of the core files of your game and if you don't like it you can uninstall it.
It's my understanding that this isn't possible. Lower texture resolution settings aren't often separate textures in the game files, they're just downscaled from the maximum-resolution file when they're loaded.
Such a combo breaker SithLord.
Didn't read some of the thread because you guys started writing books, but I will say that our work thus far on 1.2 could be described as work parallel to TSOP from an engine standpoint, but not intersecting with it yet. I'd love to incorporate the plethora of data optimizations from TSOP in the coming months as we move forward with Rebellion. The more memory we can free up the more fun stuff we can do with that extra space after all.
This is only true for non-compressed dds textures. Once you convert a texture to DXT3 or DXT5 you will experience artifacts in the image that reduce the quality.
The loss in quality is not near as noticeable if at all on the particle effects and model textures are already stored in compressed dds.
However, static elements like the UI in TSOP are much more noticeable. For example if you open the Buttons_Research_Normal.tga and compare it with TSOP's version you will notice the artifacts due to the compression.
Don't get me wrong though, I fully support TSOP and recommend anyone having issues should run with TSOP (my mod supports this currently). I would however not want UI elements converted to compressed DDS unless absolutely necessary.
Nice to see an official--and not negative--comment. They love us...they really love us.
Zombie can you show us examples of these artifacts, because i see absolutely nothing when i compare them. Unless you are reffering to the mip mapping feature of DDS. In that case i can see what you mean by artifacts. However i did not mip map the UI textures because it was unnecessary. If i saw something that degraded the texture i would have tried a different method of converting it.
I am also assuming the average user would not notice any minor degredation. However a graphic artist who is very particular might. Ironclad may have a way to convert every texture to the DDS standard without any loss in quality at all.
TGA format does not benefit from lowering the texture resolution in game. Only the DDS textures do. TGA remains the same resolution no matter what the setting.
No, I'm just referring to the DXT3/DXT5 compression with or without mipmaps. This form of compression results in artifacts in the compressed image. This is not a problem for particle animations or mesh textures and required for Sins to keep the memory down. I personally feel it does detract from the UI elements though and would rather they not be compressed with DXT3/DXT5 unless necessary for that system.
I know there are some resources online that can be googled as I did this a year or so ago when I noticed my model textures had strange artifacts after converting the tga to dds both visually and in game.
Here is a visual examples of TSOP versus the core game tga files. You can clearly see the loss in detail between the two images.
This image shows a visual comparison of the lossed detail between the raw tga and the DXT5 compressed DDS.
How about making it like an install switch? I remember alot of older games giving you choices of what texture packs to install. I'd again like to emphasize that the textures are my only issue here.
And I do respect the work you all put in, but I know of several mods going on to other games to upgrade the textures and usually some models too (which usually means completely new textures, but there are some that dont), why go backwards when eventually someone will have to undo that? I dont know about you, but I expect to play this game 10 years from now.
Like I asked above, do textures really even affect the 2gb limit? Shouldnt they be on the g-card and not the system ram? The 2gb limit should only be addressible system ram, not video ram.
It is possible to that some graphics cards may interact with how certain file types are displayed and equally possible some file changes have introduced a marginal effect on quality here and there.
I do graphics design and I have noticed minor differences in quality in some areas playing TSOP. One map I had showed a greyed out deadspace at a certain level of zoom--but when the mod was uninstalled and the same space viewed in the unmoddified game, the same dead space was there was just a tiny bit more warmth to the color.
I am also an audiophile but I listen to mp3's--as I bet nearly all of you do. The convenience, portability and interoperability of them make it a fair trade. When I rip my own cd's I rip them to ogg and have for several years but I have a duplicate folder of mp3's made or accumulated at different times for different reasons. I have Bose speakers on my comp and a set of noise cancelling hi-def headphones but I listen to Youtube as much as to my own collection and the instant availability of any song I want makes it a fair trade--and not all of them are good quality recording.
It would be easy to get into a purist argument but the fact is, TSOP began when crashes and minidumps were rampant, the biggest topics on the boards were along the lines of, "Why another %$%##%% expansion when they haven't fixed the core!?" and general rants and complaints over online playability issues with many, "Why Sins are dead..." and "Why I am leaving Sins..." posts.
TSOP made the game more playable (and still does) and was provided as an OPTION for people who needed it. If you don't need it, don't use it. I could just as easily rant about Distant Stars or any other mod, "breaking game balance" or "destroying the purity of the designer's intent" or "Fragmenting the player community by drawing people away from "True Sins" when in fact, it (and other mods) make the game more varied and more appealing.
TSOP is the same thing and if you read through the history of responses to it you will see Major Stress constantly taking the moral high ground, striving to not put anyone down with his efforts and it is those very qualities that drew the people that are helping him into the project...and he wasn't too proud or controllingh to welcome anyone in.
And to be more to the point--at a time when I was reading many old timer views that, "Sins is really over, time to move on" Major Stress actually did something positive to improve play.
Nothing to be offended with in any of this--always room for improvement and I've noticed Major Stress will usually be the first to say that.
Well done post above Rus. Great presentation of something that might be improved and great documentation.
The confusion arises because people take the term memory to mean RAM, and this can lead to some expensive mistakes as people buy PCs loaded with 4GB or RAM and a 32-bit OS, only to later realize they can’t make use of all the RAM they bought.
The 4GB limit refers to total addressable memory space and not just the RAM installed. It’s a total made up of system RAM, graphics RAM, PCI memory range, ACPI and a few other bits and pieces. And if you think that your system RAM is the only significant factor, think again. You can buy graphics cards fitted with 1GB or RAM, and if you wanted (and had the spare cash!) you could fit three of these into a system. There’s not a 1 to 1 relationship between graphics memeory consuming system RAM, but the larger the memory, the more the card sets aside for itself.
From Clearing up the 32/64-bit memory limit confusion
The worst I found for compressing to dds 5 is the fleet tree icons and the zoomed out icons and the race icons. Basically all the icons that hold your colour.
I also think there may be a slight difference between the photoshop DDS plugin and the Gimp DDS plugin. I will look at this soon but I did hear the NVidia plugin for photoshop is a better quality compressor.
I agree the IC should not compress all the textures but there is much much room for improvement and they should have a least learned from there mistakes is texture waste. Hopefully they learned not to fill a 50 car parking lt with 10 cars all over the place.
ICs Texture Guy
Sorry I could nor resist that 1
not to change subject, but anyone know if they have used the reduced poly models?
Curious to see if they did.....
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