Grimrock

More of a question to the devs really, but I notice a fair few games recently have started allowing you to upload mods that are 200Mb in size to the Steam Workshop. I was wondering if this is just an upgrade in Steam's services across the board. If it is, is there any chance that we might see 200Mb mods on the Grimrock 2 Steam Workshop soon?

I have forwarded the request to Steam.

Ok, I got an answer from Steam. Unfortunately this is not just a simple checkbox that can be toggled somewhere. It requires using a completely new Steam API and rewriting the Steam Workshop support in the Grimrock engine. Basically the way mods are enumerated, downloaded and uploaded has changed. Also there is a big conceptual change, as mods are no longer a single file, but all files in a folder (which is neat but not compatible with Grimrock mods which are all stored in a single folder as *.dat files). The Workshop integration is thousands of lines of code, so I'm very hesitant to change it at this point...

It would be completely another matter doing this for a new fresh project, but modifying an existing system is always more troublesome.

Ahh, it's a shame it's not just a switch that can be flipped - but fully understandable that you don't want to re-implement that whole module of the game! Thanks for being so transparent about it though - it's nice to know the reason why.

DAMN!

So basically if I have a mod ready to go, with a size above 100mb (it's 147 atm), it means i need to reduce its size to be able to publish it on the workshop under 100mb... with a cost of eliminating part of the textures+custom stuff. Am I right?

That's a loooot of work at this point...

well for anything up to 2 gig there''s Always the dropbox way, (up to 2 gig free storage), might not be same as steam, but should do the trick, and then there''s sites for modding like nexus and other similar modding sites, u can upload and release ya goodies from, cuz mod size can indeed expand rapidly, depending on what one is cramming in there

odinsballs wrote:well for anything up to 2 gig there''s Always the dropbox way, (up to 2 gig free storage), might not be same as steam, but should do the trick, and then there''s sites for modding like nexus and other similar modding sites, u can upload and release ya goodies from, cuz mod size can indeed expand rapidly, depending on what one is cramming in there

Thanks for the orientation!! You're great!

TheLastOrder wrote:DAMN!

So basically if I have a mod ready to go, with a size above 100mb (it's 147 atm), it means i need to reduce its size to be able to publish it on the workshop under 100mb... with a cost of eliminating part of the textures+custom stuff. Am I right?

That's a loooot of work at this point...

If it were my mod, I would make a duplicate copy of the whole thing, and then (in the copy) sort all of the models and textures from largest to smallest, and inspect them. Custom models sometimes have duplication of vertexes in them that might be deletable, some [usually non-animated] can be further simplified; textures are sometimes far larger than they need to be. You may be able to shave tens of megabytes off of your mod with negligible impact.
See if the copy looks and plays fine after the changes.
*Textures should stay powers of two.

**Optionally [and recommended] swap out as many assets as you can for suitable alternatives that are already in the default game; especially sound effects. These don't have to be included in the mod.

***If desperate: Diffuse textures and possibly videos can be color reduced and recompressed; they should then compress a bit better.

Isaac wrote:***If desperate: Diffuse textures and possibly videos can be color reduced and recompressed; they should then compress a bit better.

Unfortunately this does not help. DXT compression has a fixed compression ratio. E.g. a totally empty texture takes the same amount of memory as a noisy texture. The file size is determined only by texture size, texture format (uncompressed, dxt1 or dxt5) and whether the file has mipmaps (which in 99% cases should be enabled).

petri wrote:

Isaac wrote:***If desperate: Diffuse textures and possibly videos can be color reduced and recompressed; they should then compress a bit better.

Unfortunately this does not help. DXT compression has a fixed compression ratio. E.g. a totally empty texture takes the same amount of memory as a noisy texture. The file size is determined only by texture size, texture format (uncompressed, dxt1 or dxt5) and whether the file has mipmaps (which in 99% cases should be enabled).

The texture file still gets compressed again in the .dat, though, which I assume is what Isaac was thinking of. I just tested with a 1024x1024 DXT1 mipmapped texture and a dungeon I have lying around: an all black texture added 1132 bytes, whereas one with all pixels randomized added 692889 bytes, nearly as much as the 699192 byte size of the original file.
HOWEVER: I would never recommend actually doing this as a way to reduce the size of your mod! I tried reducing the randomized texture to 8 colours - eight - and it still added 643539 bytes. Only 49350 bytes saved, or 7% of the original size, despite eliminating almost all of the image's colour information! So colour reduction is an absolutely terrible idea on S3 compressed textures.