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MSFS texture size increases enormously during package generation

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fabs79

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germany
Hi everyone,

I have a question. I´m nearly finished with my next aiport scenery. Now I wanted to do some perfomance optimization and tweaking and realized that the finsihed package was almost 500 MB large, which I deemed just too much for a small airport project. The culprit seems to be very large dds texture sizes in the final package. Many (or all) of my 2048x2048 textures are 5.5 MB big, even though the original png file size was around 500 KB for many of them. What explains the 10x increase in texture size. and is there a way to create smaller file sizes without lowering the resolution? I see that other people manage to build large international airports with only around 150 MB package sizes, so I guess I´m doing something wrong?

Thanks and cheers,

Fabian
 
PNG is a compressed file format. DDS is not compressed at all. A 2048x2048 dds texture will always be 5,462kb in size no matter what detail it contains.

The simulator uses DDS because it does not waste time and valuable CPU/GPU cycles having to uncompress PNG files when it loads as the files need to be uncompressed as some point before being rendered.

If you zip the files for your package for distribution it will compress the dds files to be a lot smaller but when installed they will return to their normal size. Are you comparing download size to your package size because once installed those large airports will take up much more space.

Also, you may be using way too many 2048x2048 textures. There is an art to using just the right sized textures. Not too small that you lose detail, not too big that you end up with very large files.
 
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Anthony31 said:
PNG is a compressed file format. DDS is not compressed at all. A 2048x2048 dds texture will always be 5,462kb in size no matter what detail it contains.

The simulator uses DDS because it does not waste time and valuable CPU/GPU cycles having to uncompress PNG files when it loads as the files need to be uncompressed as some point before being rendered.

If you zip the files for your package for distribution it will compress the dds files to be a lot smaller but when installed they will return to their normal size. Are you comparing download size to your package size because once installed those large airports will take up much more space.

Also, you may be using way too many 2048x2048 textures. There is an art to using just the right sized textures. Not too small that you lose detail, not too big that you end up with very large files.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the insight, I normally use 2k textures only if I use a single texture sheet for a smaller model, for lage models I use 1k repeating textures. I'll try to optimize my workflow a little bit more. I saw that in substance painter you can define a resolution for each individual material, that might be helpful to choose a sensible size. Am I right assuming that you would use smaller sized textures for assets that are physically smaller in the Sim (say: a signpost, a door handle....) and larger or repeating textures for large objects? To somehow keep the pixels per square meter largely coherent throughout the scenery?
 
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