(edit for clarity: by "compress", I mean downsize, i.e. make them lower resolution.)



So, I know that ATM modding 3D models & textures is not supported, but I thought: why not ask here anyway, maybe someone can put me on the right track.



What I'm trying to do is resize the textures such that they take up less space in my graphics card's memory, in order to improve performance (I know this works very nicely for other games so why not try for this one?). However, whenever I resize a texture (basically export it to dds, use paint.net to resize it, save it to the same format it was in, and then import the file back into the asset file), it doesn't get rendered anymore in the game. E.g. I resized the centaur texture files and now all I see when they walk around is their weapons and shields waving in the air.



Clearly, I'm doing something wrong. Could anyone give me some pointers as to what other files need to be changed to get this to work?

If you compress files in memory, wouldn't it have to be uncompressed at some point again for manipulations? I'm at a loss for how that would even increase performance on a hardware or driver level. Furthermore, just because you compress the files doesn't mean the engine is written such that it supports the file format. You can't mod that if the code at the bottom assumes it is a given format. Even if Unity does support the file format, there might be assumptions in the actual game code about formats. I wouldn't know though.

limith wrote:
If you compress files in memory, wouldn't it have to be uncompressed at some point again for manipulations? I'm at a loss for how that would even increase performance on a hardware or driver level. Furthermore, just because you compress the files doesn't mean the engine is written such that it supports the file format. You can't mod that if the code at the bottom assumes it is a given format. Even if Unity does support the file format, there might be assumptions in the actual game code about formats. I wouldn't know though.

Nah I'm talking about downsizing them, so that they are a lower resolution. E.g. I could resize a 1024x1024 texture into 512x512 for example. This dramatically reduces video memory usage (Perhaps "compressing" is a badly chosen word though). For some games you can just do that and it will work immediately, but for this game, I'm guessing there is something somewhere else that I have to change to tell the game the texture is now 512x512 and no longer 1024x1024.



I edited my OP to make this clearer.

Many games like this assume the image is a specific size and you cannot use other sizes. I had this problem with some old civilization modding.

Elucidus wrote:
Many games like this assume the image is a specific size and you cannot use other sizes. I had this problem with some old civilization modding.

Hmm, that would be a bummer .



The textures appear to be many different resolutions though (some units have 512x512, other 1024x1024, yet others 1024x512, and I found one (so far) that only has 256x256. Sometimes one unit has multiple resolution textures, e.g. DIFF and MASK 1024x1024, NORM 512x512 and SPEC 256x256). It makes me believe that they wouldn't hardcode all of that but instead store it externally to the exe file somehow.