A question about copying art

[Pomphis]

I intend to copy some more units from LoR. Is it possible to simply copy the complete Wolfshanze.FPK ? With uncopied units simply taking up space but not bothering anything, so that I can then deal with unitinfos at leisure ? Or may duplicates (units already existing in the target Mod) cause problems ?

 

[Leoreth]

Depends on what you consider a problem. The entire FPK will be loaded into your memory, whether you need the art or not. Since the 32 bit architecture of the Civ4 engine limits how much memory it can use, this can lead to problems such as reduced performance or (at worst) MAFs and crashes. The "cleaner" way to handle it is to use PakBuild to unpack the FPK and (if needed) compress your own after you're done modding.

However, if you are only trying things out during your own development, it shouldn't matter in any way.

 

[Nightinggale]

The "cleaner" way to handle it is to use PakBuild to unpack the FPK and (if needed) compress your own after you're done modding.

I recommend against using FPK files.

Pros:

• loads the mod faster

Cons:

• FPK files are uncompressed, meaning they will not really reduce file size
• some files (like movies) are read from the disk when needed even if they are in an FPK, meaning loading the FPK will store those files in memory and then never read them
  
• Editing FPKs is way more work than if you have access to all files directly
• svn and git becomes really inefficient when filesize increases. They work way better when they store individual files and only modify a few at a time
• FPKs are loaded into memory, making them more memory inefficient. The game will use less memory overall even if you use every single file in an FPK
• FPKs can cause crashes at startup, particularly on 32 bit systems, though 64 bit are affected as well
• FPKs can cause weird unexplainable issues ingame, mainly graphics related

It's a lot of tradeoffs for a faster loading time.

 

[Leoreth]

Yeah, it's probably worth getting a couple of complaints each months that your mods needs more time to load than C2C

 

[Pomphis]

Thank you, I will see. My concern was whether for example the art for a Warrior now existing twice might cause problems. I have a 64 bit system with 32 GB so I hope that will be able to handle another 96 MB or so.

 

[Leoreth]

Unfortunately your system specs are not the deciding factor. Civ4 is implemented as a 32 bit application and can therefore only use 2 GB of memory of your hardware. There is a tool to increase that to 4 GB (see here, I posted this in my mod's subforum but it applies to BtS as a whole), but that's it. Still you're right that ~100 MB more or less won't be much of an issue.