How many is too many?

[daglob]

The question has been asked before about how many mehses or hero files are "too many". I know, because I'm one of the people who asked.

I haven't been able to play FF for a couple of months now, because it took a half an hour to load and almost that to unload, and the game often stalled out for as much as ten minutes before I restarted the computer. I had been weeding out my meshes to try and not have so much data, and finally to to play one day last week. It got slower and slower as I went along, but it played.

The next day I took all my hero files but six and put them in another directory. The game loaded in less than 30 seconds. I played a danger room scenario until I decided it was supper time. Loading the 3000 custom meshes in the hero creation section still takes three or four minutes, but it no longer freezes up for several minutes while you are looking through them.

So, I've added back nearly 500 Hero files. It now takes 45-50 seconds to load, but unloads in less than 20 seconds. Game play seems good.

Now, I'm sure that with a more modern computer with more memory and a faster prcessor than mine the numbers would be different, but what I'm saying is that it seems like the Hero files are the deciding factor here. I think someone may have said that before, but there was no coroborating data.

It's no trouble at all to move around hero files, add a couple, remove a couple , for a specific game. The only problem I see here is having "orphan" data in the DAT files, but I don't know enough about it to be sure.

[stumpy]

That's a useful find. I was wondering if it was the number of meshes that was at issue. It's handy because, as you note, HERO files are easy to move.

I am pretty sure HERO files don't leave any data in the DAT files. Even the saved game files (which are DAT files) don't care if a custom hero who has been recruited has his HERO file removed, because it doesn't look at the HERO file after recruitment.

That said, some FFX customization may be lost if you move HERO files and re-run the FFX Control Centre. But, I don't know for sure. I would be tempted to test with a custom character (e.g customize him, close the CC, move the HERO file, re-open theCC (not looking at that character), close the CC, put the HERO file back, then open the CC and see if the character's customizations are still there. I suspect that you will lose FFX customizations for custom characters if you customize another character with the same customization slot (e.g. they both have the NOCTURNAL attribute) while the HERO file is moved.

[GogglesPizanno]

I figured this out a while ago myself. Ive gotten in the habit of when I'm working on any kind of modding or scripting of moving all my hero files into temp directory cause the game loads soooo much faster. Then when I have stuff working the way i want, move them back. I never thought about the FFX issue and branding them after moving them back and forth, but I'm usually just testing scripting or maps so FFX isn't an issue at that point.

i wonder if it might be an interesting experiment to write up a BAT file that could copy hero files in and out of the directory before running the shortcut based on the game type you are playing. So if you just wanted to play with Alpha Flight, have a batch script that only moved those characters into the hero file directory to optimize game load time? I realize that just replaces one level of complexity with another, but ya know....

[USAgent]

Yeah I just drip in the hero files that I want to use at the time and remove them when I am done. I don't know of a exact number when the loading time starts to really drag on though.  And I ave found that you do need to rebrand the hero files after you put them back in to get FFX stuff to work.
I also found that when you put your meshes in the "C:\Program Files\Irrational Games\Freedom Force vs The 3rd Reich\Custom\Art\library\characters" directory the game loads and runs faster than if they are in "C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Application Data\Irrational Games\Freedom Force vs the 3rd Reich........" directory.