Textureless: Retro Pixel Nostalgia

by b10hxrd

Downscales non-UI graphics to 1/8th size. This mod was made by hand in flashing terminals using accelerated magicks and ubiquitous automation interpreting.

Overhaul
a month ago
2.0
123

g Technical Question

a month ago

Could this help push the limits of the game by freeing up resources if the games tick rate starts to suffer? IE: Late game mega bases.

a month ago
(updated a month ago)

Heya. I made a serious attempt before this version to create a mod that physically downsizes the textures in the game. The reduction in storage capacity I though might lead at least to quicker from-disk load times, and perhaps speedier atlasing during instantiation for the GPU. In the creation of this released version, the effect of downsizing is artificial: the same pixel width and height for each sprite has been carefully retained.

I wrote a blog post about that journey: https://gist.github.com/junelva/e17863599c3c0d524d958aced1680e59

There was an error I was running into when attempting the original hard-downsizing during the atlasing of animated sprites that seemed to reference hardcoded sprite dimensions, or otherwise reference sprite dimensions that are determined in the C++ and not changeable in the lua, where there are many squishycoded raw pixel dimensions. I did naively try to perform a lot of code generation at that time upon these sprite-related lua functions in these game, but it was all to no avail. I could not bypass the error.

However I have been thinking about it, and another issue I circumvented was done by fixing the sprite dimensions. Before that, I was aggressively altering the dimensions. The possible thing I have not tried is downsizing the many non-power-of-two-sized sprite textures by common denominators between the original width and height, and I have not had the energy or interest in trying to brute-force my way around this error anymore.

a month ago
(updated a month ago)

To answer your question, though, I don't know. If anything, even hard-replacing the textures in your game data with this texture pack's versions, the performance boost would probably only be during initial load-from-disk. I don't believe the on-disk texture data is kept in memory after instantiation on the GPU. If it is, then you'll have a RAM boost from that. I was not able to detect one, but my way of measuring this was not very reliable.

As for impacting the tick rate, the only potential in which that relationship could occur is if textures were being streamed from disk by the CPU during gameplay, taking time from ticking, and this is not done; they are not handled this way

But I'm still wondering if there are other ways to make mods that do improve performance

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