Addon makers, stop wasting HW performance on duplicit textures

[5133p39 16]

I discovered that many P3D models in various addons are using the same default BIS textures (from base ArmA or QG) over and over again, while distributing these textures INSIDE THE PBO.

In case of my MOD directories, if all those addons were using textures from the ArmA/QG PBO files instead of using duplicit textures inside addon's PBO, the size of many addons would be significantly decreased - in many cases the addons could be 80% smaller!!!

Please understand, i don't actually care much about the wasted HDD space, but i think it has to have unnecessary performance impact when ArmA is loading such addons.

Which is especially annoying when you are constantly restarting ArmA during the tweaking/testing of your addons.

Now i am not sure why people do this, personaly i think its their lazyness, but i could be wrong - is there some reason i fail to grasp?

...i don't really think this post of mine can change anything, but at least i tried.

[thesun 14]

I agree that using textures from stock ArmA is a bit of awaste of space but if an addonmaker wants to use QGs textures it's better to have then in the addon pbo since not everyone does have QG. And i don't think that loading one texture more times (even from different pbos) should be a probem since it's still the same texture. It's like placing more soldiers using the same weapon (and because of that the same textures) in the editor. I might be wrong here though.

[5133p39 16]

I agree that using textures from stock ArmA is a bit of awaste of space but if an addonmaker wants to use QGs textures it's better to have then in the addon pbo since not everyone does have QG. And i don't think that loading one texture more times (even from different pbos) should be a probem since it's still the same texture. It's like placing more soldiers using the same weapon (and because of that the same textures) in the editor. I might be wrong here though.

That is not exactly true, because most of the addons using some QG textures, are configred that the QG is required (by using the directive requiredAddons, and that is maybe even if they are not directly dependant on other QG content), so if you do not have QG then ArmA won't load that addon.

And i don't think ArmA considers these duplicit textures to be the same (even though they in fact are the same).

addon1.pbo\data\same_texture.paa

addon2.pbo\some_dir\data\same_texture.paa

I bet that ArmA is handling them as two different textures (instead of one texture in memory, you have two textures in memory.

I don't think ArmA is creating some checksums for each texture it loads, and then check if they are the same.