@os79,
I fully understand that, please give me more credit than that. Any buildings, units, resources, bonus, any xml or python or SDK that is not currently being actively used by the Mod is taking up "space" and even "byte" levels add up over time. How many sections of the different codings are "commented out" but still there? How many unused xml files still reside in the xml files? Keeping all these "cleaned up" helps with mod size.
JosEPh
I understand your thought Joseph, so I would like to give a closer look to what is weighting in RAND's total size.
I still use rev 739 in my pc, so I'll make my analysis on it:
RAND takes up 1.68 GB of space here. If we look inside of it, Assets take 1.63 GB. This means everything else sums up to 50 MB (or 3% of the total).
Inside of Assets we have the main reasons of Memory usage in:
Art - 362 MB
Modules - 375 MB
Sounds - 321 MB
ANDPak0 - 155 MB
RoMPak - 308 MB
This totals 1.521 GB, or 90% of the memory usage in all RAND (or 93% of Assets). XML totals 44.6 MB, which is 3% of the total (and still 3% of assets), and Python totals 4.78 MB, which doesn't even give 1%. So any changes in any of these two folders like even cutting in half their size, won't bring much difference. With less then 25 MB in gain. And I even doubt "garbage space" in these folders could take up to half their sizes.
So let's take a deeper look at these new sources of Memory Usage:
Both Paks are single files, and I have no idea what they do. Here a dev will have a better answer for the question: is that possible to remove garbage data from these files as to reduce at least in more then 10% of their total size? They sum up to 463 MB, which is 28% of the total.
Sounds are only sound files, so I can't see what can be done here. The only way to reduce it is by decreasing quality or diversity. Of course if there are a bunch of sound files that aren't being used anymore, then this is a good source of cleaning.
Modules, as the name says, are addons. If this could be downloaded separately, then it would greatly decrease RAND's size (it costs 22% of RAND's total size). I think that makes sense, they are addons, like MCP, so why not download separately?
Art now needs to be divided again. In Art we have:
Movies - 324 MB
RoMModularWonders - 33.2 MB
Rest - 4.8 MB
So we may see that movies, are the true consumer of Art, as it totals 19% of total RAND space.
Nothing against Vokarya's Work (which is splendid, and must be loved by those who like graphics stuff), but I don't care to graphics. Actually I'd love to decrease it in every possible way, as to make the game engine more powerful to handle even bigger and more complex games. In the question of memory usage brought by Joseph, the best scenario for it IMO would be making 3 links: RAND, RAND - No movies, RAND's Modules. With this, Rand - no Movies (and without the modules) would be lifted of 41% of its total size, bringing rev 739 back to 991 MB. I don't think that on the actual revision it would be much different, but anyone may check the relative sizes and compare with those here to see if something has drastically changed. If the worst changes were on Modules and/or Movies, then it'll relief the mod's size even more.
I don't know if it's hard to remove the movies, so that has to be accounted too.
But my actual most desired change in memory usage is the one that slows the game flow. If there could be one or more options to decrease the game memory usage while it's running (I think that's the RAM right?), I would be even happier. I already play with minimum everything, the simplest graphical options possible, to see if my pc can handle the biggest, slowest and most civ-crowded of games. I would even be incredibly happy to have it look like Civ III, if that enhanced a lot the game processing. LHs are awesome, but if static heads/flags can make my game faster, I'll put them. If that's not a hard thing to do, I would be really grateful (that's the only reason that I accepted the idea of changing Trade Routes, although I would only get rid of them after getting rid of everything I described above, but I'm no modder so I have to stick to reality).