I heard this said, but hard to see how as decompressing files after usually more expensive computationally.

I think compressing only takes up less room in memory. Which is important when you start measuring your cc in gigs.

There are people who don't? XD

Maybe on other sites such as notmodthesims

Yours truly, for one. I haven't been able to play since around June 2024 (due to a variety of computer issues I'm not interested in discussing right now), but my main profile's Downloads folder still only weighs in at a little under 720 MB -- including disabled files. And if/when I can finally get things to a playable state, I'm likely going to do some mod/CC gardening.

You mean harddrive space, or RAM?

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I can't say I've noticed much difference with compressed/non-compressed files in regards to loading and game performance, but it does have a positive effect on harddrive space (especially if you've got limited space).

I compressed the rest of my CC a while back, but I didn't see much of a difference in game performance or loading. Reasonably sure I had around 33 GB when I started, now it's down to about 25 GB, though I did throw out at least 0.5-1 GB. And then added some new stuff

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Uncompressed files take up a lot of harddrive space - Before compressing the file, textures with DXT3/5 compression in the TXTR usually take up about 1-1.4 mb for each included 1024x1024 px texture, and between 250-700 kb for each 512x512 texture. It adds up quickly. Higher poly meshes also count in the file size, though not as much.

Uncompressed textures (RAW format), take up about 2-4x the space of those again, and even seem to be a bit heavier on the game (somewhat higher chance of pink-flashing or other related issues). These won't compress to any significant degree, either.

Uncompressed recolors of a spesific object will usually have the same filesize before compressing, so you can roughly know which texture size it uses just by looking at the filesize (unless there are multiple textures).

Bodyshop files/textures already get compressed to some degree (compressing them usually only removes a few kb) - otherwise they'd be much larger straight out of "shop" (1024x textures... go figure), so the game already can deal with compressed files.

If the textures have a lot of empty space with areas that won't show on the mesh or has areas with little to no detail, the files get smaller when compressed. Lots of detail cause larger files (if you use patterns, only put the pattern in areas that are showing, and cover up areas of the texture that aren't in use with a single color, especially in Bodyshop and if you intend to compress the files. The files end up much smaller).

I don't think it impacts loading speed noticeably. The compression format is simple. Most resources in the game itself are compressed and will form the bulk of the loading processs. I don't like to use compression on the whole package because there is no gain from compressing small resources that are around 1 kB each, and searching over compressed data becomes impossible. Like the guy above said, compression works if you have a lot of redundancy like areas of the same color, or a table with nearly the same rows. A photographic image can't be compressed any with lossless compression.

Textures in compressed form (S3TC) work much faster because they are kept compressed in memory and uncompressed on the fly in the video card. If your texture doesn't have transparency, you can save one half of the space on both disk and memory by selecting the DXT1 format instead of DXT3 or DXT5. If there is a quality difference between these, then it is from a flaw in the encoder. There is no difference in the nVidia encoder, but there might be when encoded directly from Sim PE by loading a TGA/PNG instead of a prepared DDS.

It sucks that compression on big resources usually fails when used directly in Sim PE, and the compressorizer utility must be used for images and models.

I remember actually uncompressing parts of my custom eyes so I could search the little text strings and find what specific file a Sim was using.

Compressing has very negligible effects on game loading, and is more for if you have limited space on your SSD/HDD, as the compression methods used by the compressor is a rather simplistic format. If you really want an edge in terms of game loading speed you'd want to merge files instead since that reduces how many files your disk and the game has to shove into both memory and disk cache so that fetching them becomes quicker.

Yes, compressing and merging are two different things and shouldn't be confused with each other.

I've never bothered- I've never been low on hard drive space!

Wish I could say the same. The idiots at MSI decided to only give me a 512GB SSD, sure it's a Mark 2, so it loads quicker than my old Samsung Mark 1 I had in my previous desktop PC, but I miss the extra TB of space. I'm constantly uninstalling and reinstalling a majority of my games because of low space. Now, I do have an external 2TB HDD, but that has to go through the USB 3.0 port which is, if I am to be crass, slow as fuck for loading games. Especially todays large 100+ GB games.

Only game I always keep installed is TS2. And That's because it's a major pain in the ass to set up on todays operating systems as we all know.

@Yinepu Is this a laptop? Maybe you could replace the hard drive with a latger one. I've always played on desktop, I think if you want to play games you really need something with good cooling and a lot of storage.

Yeah it is. Was once considered a higher end "gaming" laptop when I bought it circa 2021, but would be more mid-range now.

I don't know much about modifying laptops as honestly this is the first laptop I've had since I was a kid in school. Usually I would use a desktop PC but I needed something more portable for my lifestyle. I remember replaceable MK2 SSD was one of the advertised features, albeit in the very small print!

Cooling hasn't been much a problem for me, this thing has vents all along on the sides and bottom of the case and I tend to keep it always on flat surfaces with semi-regular cleaning of the vents (and keyboard, as I hate grungy keyboards).