Reducing the SE4 footprint.

[dogscoff]

Good idea Urendi, except I'm on dialup and a 800 meg upload would not be fun.

I guess I could send you a CD by snail mail though, if you PM me your address. I think I'll probably "make the burn" next week, after I've spent the weekend on the KanesS images.

[Krsqk]

Lessee, 800 MB at ~3.5KB upload per second (pretty generous with my ISP), it would take...

*taps calculator keys furiously*

...approximately 3900 minutes, or 65 hours, or 2.7 days. That's assuming, of course, that you remembered to turn off call waiting so you didn't get disconnected halfway through.

[dogscoff]

Also, my dialup kicks me off every 2 or 3 hours. Barbaric or what?

I suppose I could plug my laptop into my mobile phone and use GPRS, that doesn't kick me off. However, it does charge me £7.50 per meg. So for an 800 meg upload that would be something like £6000 sterling.

Nice.

EDIT: The other option is to take my laptop, my wireless networking card, my copy of netstumbler, go for a drive and see if I can borrow *cough*steal*cough* me some free bandwidth courtesy of an unsuspecting corporate HQ somewhere...

[ May 16, 2003, 14:53: Message edited by: dogscoff ]

[geoschmo]

D, are you still trying to find ways to save space or did you get it all straight? I have some suggestions. I may have missed them, but I don't see these listed in the thread.

You can remove the manual directory entirely. Only used if you ever hit the help screens during the game. > 7meg (EDIT: Oops, you did have this one already.)

If all the pc's you are going to use the game on are the same display size ie, 800x600, or 1024x768, then reducing the color depth of the system bitmaps for the size you aren't going to use will free a TON of space with no change in game image quality. > 2 Meg

You can reduce the color depth of the intro and finale bitmaps. Those a few for the biggest files in the Se4 install, and are only used for a few seconds of the game. Lower quality for those wouldn't really detract from game play. Heck, you might never even see the finale screens. > 1 - 3 Meg

Many mods have customized intro screens. Nice for their ego, but totally unneccesary if you are tight on space. > 1 Meg

Hope these help.

Geoschmo

[ May 16, 2003, 15:10: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[dogscoff]

Thanks Geo, good suggestions.

Actually, since starting this thread I've installed several new shipsets and mods, so I think it is impossible for Se4 to ever get any smaller. I'm going to have to just give in and burn myself 2 CDs.

Still, this thread might turn out to be useful to someone, somewhen.

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Lisif Deoral:
Can SEIV handle RLE (compressed) windows bitmaps?
Last year I was running short of disk space and tried to compress them, but I can't remember if it worked or not (I decided to buy a new hard disk

Edit: yes, it can handle them. Anyway, they're limited to a palette of 256 colors, so you'll need to reduce color depth (but IMHO the game won't lose anything).

D, you didn't comment on this one, not sure if you saw it. I tested too and the only difference in the images I can see is a slight increase in graininess. And unless you have the before and after images side by side it's not even perceptable. Although, I didn't try every race pic. Some may be more obvious then others.

Reducing the image files from 24-bit to 256 color reduces their files size by a little more than half. That's like one Meg per race. That might get you one one CD.

There are utilities that can batch convert those files too. Doing it by hand would take years. Irfanview is one.

Geoschmo

EDIT: Actuallly I am not sure I did the same thing as him. I am not sure what RLE compressed is. I jsut opened the image in paint and "saved as" 256 color.

[ May 16, 2003, 15:26: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[Andrés]

RLE encoding reduces bmp sizes much more than just 256 colors.
I used paint shop pro to batch convert most pictures. Unless those pics with many minis (planets, comps, facilities, ect) and the main background, all other pictures look fine when reduced to 256 colors, some can even be reduced to 16 colors with little noticeable difference.

Edit: Pictures of the shipsets I'm uploading now to KDY are RLE encoded. Check the unzipped sizes.

[ May 17, 2003, 03:40: Message edited by: Andres ]