Merging mods to increase Performance!
graycurse:
Quote from: cefwyn on 2010 January 04, 17:27:40
you really want to try to get that number as close to 1 as possible as it also reduces fragmentation(depending on file size and hardware) and can make the entire game engine run smoother.
That COULD present a problem, though. I'll use programming practices as a metaphor. The more code you put in one class, the more likely you'll run into errors/the more difficult it will be to debug and maintain. If someone were to put EVERY piece of CC into one package, it's highly likely something will blow up. It'll take quite a bit of time to find the issue. I've tried both ways (with my CC packaged into hair/clothes/patterns/etc. packages or everything in one big package) and I haven't noticed a speed/performance difference with one package or ten.
J. M. Pescado:
I don't think one package, or ten packages, is going to make a noticeable difference. The difference comes in those people who have OVER 9000 packages.
cefwyn:
Yeah, on most hardware the difference between the game loading one package versus 10 packages is immeasurable, but you really want to keep the number down to as few as you can. Since you can't guarantee that packages made by other people are going to be 100% stable all the time (especially after EA releases a patch) it may not necessarily be a good idea to create a single package with everything in it as it would be difficult to debug, but less files will usually mean an increase in stability. I've still got about 60 package files and it runs just fine (I'm still not yet sure how best to merge some of them), but as I said in my last post you really want to keep it well below 100 as you'll definitely start noticing problems around that point on most hardware. Ideally 1 package should be more stable then even 10, but then if you have a lot of packages (>1GB worth) you start getting into problems with NTFS causing file fragmentation which will also reduce performance.
dilpill:
When I was attempting to manually merge all of the packages extracted from the December Store files a few weeks ago, I gave up when I ran into about 50 instances of the 0x00000000000000 resource. They contained the description that is displayed when you mouse over the items in-game, so I assumed they were necessary. ::)
It's good to know that they are completely superfluous, though.
cefwyn:
If those files were tagged as type 0x73E93EEB(_XML.manifest) then they appear to be safe to delete since they are probably only used by the launcher. To be on the safe side all I did (For most of them, I did delete some and havn't noticed anything missing) was undelete them, go into "Details..." for that resource and edit it's instance number to be something like 0x0000000001, or 2, etc.(Just as long as the number is unique in that package). I've been slowly experimenting with the internals of the package file so I may eventually get around to writing a package merging app which checks for hash collisions and then tries to merge them or at least provide a difference file so the user can interactively merge them like with windiff or similar apps.
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