It wasn't aimed at you personally anyways
I just replied to some of your arguments how I see things differently.
It's commendable being a talented modder and sharing new things for a community.
But it's pretty pathetic going completely mental as soon someone actually uses those assets in a way that you personally not agree with and start nitpicking on everything that happens with said assets. Just let it go. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be efficient. As long it's enjoyable, just go for it.
You're 100 % right that optimizing and trimming down assets is a very essential part of professional game development.
However this isn't professional game development. It's just a hobby. And the 4 GB patch makes it 100% redundant.
I hope you can figure out why the patch isn't working for you.
Because there are at least 2 very brilliant looking mods to come out soon that require it.
And to answer about your performance questions. There is no performance difference using a 118 MB UD pack or the original 380 MB pack. As long you use the 4 GB patch.
Outdoor areas with sky and water are much more stressing your system than using big size textures.
This is basically true with most games out there. The difference in using low or ultra texture size in any game has very little impact in fps as long you have the required amount of VRAM. Same thing with anisotropic filtering pushed to 16X. It's the other graphical nonsense that are much more taxing.
Shadows and physics for example usually have a big impact on cpu performance while other graphical things like tessellation, hbao and other graphical settings have a more severe impact on gpu performance.
The secret of keeping up fps in your mod is to use small default (32x32?) size in outdoor maps limiting physics, sky and water.
Or simply counter it with a decent cpu with high ipc. LoG2 is single threaded and thus running on 1 cpu core.
Basically if you're making an indoor map without a sky entity, you can generally go nuts.
As soon you introduce a sky and make an outdoor map, potato pc's will start to struggle.
A 6 year old intel i5 cpu clocked at 4 GHz like my i5 3570k for example is a good cpu to run loG2 as it has superior ipc performance
A 6 year old AMD FX 8350 which came out around the same time/price clocked at 4 GHz is a poor choice for loG2 because of poor single core performance. This doesn't mean that this cpu is bad, it's just better suited for different multithreaded apps while offering poor performance in single threaded apps.
as for GPU power, anything above 3 Teraflops (basically gpu's from 2012+) should have no issue.
Also in your GPU graphics settings, enforce 16x anisotropic filtering to make LoG2 look better.
Also running VSR (AMD) or DSR (nVIDIA) makes the game look extra nice if you're running a potato screen resolution.
This does require more performance offcourse.
The 4 GB patch makes this all possible and makes it possible to run several mods in Highest settings without crashing when using anything higher than Medium graphics settings. For example Eye of Atlantis suffers from this issue. But works 100 % fine with the patch.
Basically in this sort of development, you shouldn't waste time on any performance related issues.
If people decide to play your mod on a potato computer, it's their fault for not playing it on a decent rig.
And if people don't want to use the 4 GB patch whatsoever for whatever reason, it's their loss.
You're basically lowering your overall graphical fidelity for everyone that plays your mod, while you can just go all the way making it look georgeous without effort or wasting any time. Why would you limit your mod limiting the overall use of fancy graphics and custom assets for some poor soul that doesn't have a decent computer or because some weird person with crazy ideas thinks you should.
This obsessive need to keep file size small is totally unnecessary. Yet too many people keep stressing over it for no logical reason. It doesn't lower performance at all. Just use the patch and let your creativity fly.
Any mod/map can become playable even on toaster rigs by simply letting the user use the following command line:
for e in party.map:allEntities() do if e.sky then e.sky:setFarClip(32) return end end
(changing the 32 number into an acceptable figure)
and then use
for e in party.map:allEntities() do if e.sky then e.sky:setFogRange{22,32}return end end
to introduce some fog.
