On Friday, March 18, 2011 09:50:50 AM HB-GRAL wrote:
> Hi all
>
> Today I checked the current fgdata/Aircraft folder for sizes. It’s about
> 4,3 GB here. Nice.
>
> Now some statistics (and this is no critcs on aircrafts of course, I
> like all the development and improvements a lot!):
>
> We have 372 aircrafts in the directory. 22 of this aircrafts have more
> than 30 MB and this 22 aircraft gives 1,1 GB of the aircraft folder.
>
> Number One is "p51d" with 104.5 MB (!). 50 MB in the models folder comes
> from GIMP .xcf-files and from Blender files (.blend). Do we distribute
> this files uncompressed? i. e. compressing .xcf to .gz will give a 1,2
> file instead of a 4,3 MB.
I think 12 MB vs. 43 MB.
>
> Number Two is 767-300 with 82,2 MB. I. e. this one comes with widely
> used .wav-sounds in the cabin ;-) This sounds, or better short loops,
> take 17,3 MB here. One livery (VRN.png) takes 6.3 MB.
>
> Number three is MiG-15, a really nice one, with a lot of instruments,
> and it seems like every byte is used here. I am looking deeper into the
> files and I see a radio-tune.wav which has 3.5 MB for 10 seconds of
> sound and 10 seconds of silence ;-)
>
> Some models like IAR80 have liveries with 13 MB .png-files.
>
> Totally we distribute 18 blender files with the directory. This is only
> 16,4 MB. Not much. But we distribute also 310 MB of original GIMP files.
> Some of this files are .gz already, when I .gz the rest I get another
> 100 MB, or in other words I get two MiG-15 or another p51d.
>
> Cheers, Yves
I think Yves has several good points. First many of these advanced models
have "working files" that are not actually used when the model is being flown
in
sim. The p51d GIMP files and blender files are two examples. Now there are
valid reasons for these to be source controlled. For example the gimp files in
the p51d/Models directory are complex multi layer files that are intended to
make working with the resulting textures easier and they do indeed do that.
Reading Yves comments I think one of the things he hionted was not so much
that these working files made GIT bigger but that that they made the
distribution size to users bigger and really served no purpose for users other
than wasting disk space and bandwidth. This is a valid concern at least if
the size of these working files is significant and in some of these case they
are.
A look at p51d/Models clearly shows that the three big space users are (in
order of the highest space useage) the working files mostly in the form of high
resolution multi layer textures, 3D models and the actual textures. In the
case of the p51d all 3D models are AC3D files and many of the textures except
some newer ones are *.rgb files. These are not the most compact formats and
changing these could reduce the size of the model significantly but the 800
pound gorrila is still the working files.
In the case of the p51d, and I suspect that this is true for most models, the
working files could be located anywhere in the file system tree. And perhaps
it
makes sense to have a directory with a standard name that is used for these
types of files that is always excluded (somehow?) when regular user gets a copy
but is included for GIT clones. In the case of the p51d this would cut the
size of the distributed copy almost in half.
The 3D and texture parts of the p51d are now fairly far along and will not
grow too much more even though there is still 3D work that needs to be done.
It's size will only grow by perhaps 10% as it 3D model and FDM are finalized.
There may be other models that get implemented for more complex aircraft that
could result in significantly larger models. I suspect that the 100 meg p51d
to 310+ meg IAR80 sort of represents the size range we will be seeing for
really advanced highly detailed models with a few really careful modelers
being able to bring these numbers down to lower levels while achiving the same
effective level of detail like the Mig-15 does.
I really think we are only seeing the begining of a period where are will see
more efforts to take existing models to the "next level" and where we will
start seeing new additions that enter GIT already in a very advanced state.
As this process unfolds we will see many more models that approach the size of
the ones listed by Yves. We don't want to discourage that work but if we can
create a set of best practices we can perhaps help those working on this stuff
create these highly detailed aircraft while using less space for the files
needed to support this work.
Hal
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