[Campeador]

rstaats10, I am glad that you are finding new ways to increase performance on the game. Since you mention the jpg size the last time I have been experimenting with it and like you said no real noticeable game difference in quality. On the next mod the 512 x 512 skin textures of the ships will be reduced to 256 x 256 except for one or two that benefit from the higher resolution like the Arcadia (the main star of the story).
On my mod I do not mind changing anything but with the original game I try not to mess with what is already there since after all this time is well proven to work. But if reducing the effects bitmaps of the torpedoes improves the game so dramatically I will look into it.
I am not that concern about landscapes and portraits since the game stops when those are on the screen. My may concern is game play. I never thought about converting the bitmaps into jpg, I was pretty much following what was there on the original game, but you are right making this changes would have save a great deal of space on the hard drive, even thought the download will not be reduced more than what it is since both bmp and jpg graphic files do compress tremendously. You are also correct about making changes now in the middle of the series. It is an easy way to have a mess on my hands.
Changing ships skin size is easy and can be exchange in any of the campaigns on the fly without any problems since there are no changes on the code. The bitmap files is a different story since I have to change the graphic name calling from bmp to jpg and I want to use the same format from campaign one to the last and I do not want to go back and edit the first two campaigns. But on the next mod I will implement a few.

"It was as if the fighters were on "steroids" or something." mmm... that means that I can have even more fighters... I did have a scenario with over 100 capital ships but stretched over a long period of time, but so far my record is 66 fighters (not counting the ones on capital ships) appearing between 20 tics of time (that is that is like having all of them at once on the screen) on a scenario (Multiverse 2), ... mmm... Now if I can have more fighters than that run stable on my Athlon 2000+ (1.67GHz), mmm... the mayhem I can create!