Check your custom skin size!
 

Custom skins are bad enough for online flying but when I find a 12.3Mb .bmp skin in my cache folder its beyond a joke.

Leave it out or learn to make them smaller.

LOL, i bet that same person complains about performance/stuttering :P

Wait, 12MB?
can you post a pic of that skin?! Its not mine but damn I want to see what a 12MB skin looks like! Lol

probably the reason I was seeing warping BF109s?

Probably not...but 12mb jesus!

bet! ;)

Everyone calm down! :grin:
This file (C:\Users\Tom\Documents\1C SoftClub\il-2 sturmovik cliffs of dover\cache\picture.bmp) is a temporary file! NO MATTER how big the skin.jpg!
I deleted all files from cache folder, before i run the game tonight (I tested only offline). When i load a custom skin in the game, the 12MB picture.bmp immediately appears (my own skin is 150k .jpg). And immediately appears a custom numbered .dds texture-file too. So... it"s just a temporary uncompressed picture, which the game create and uses to convert the skins.

Sounds like one undamaged skin & 7 layers of damaged skins, all uncompressed.

My apologies guys, I assumed everything in the cache folder was downloaded. I only fly on line.

I trawled through my cache and I found a 2.7Mb .dds file and a 1.26Mb .jpg file for the same skin which I guess is the one that downloaded.

I wonder why CoD creates a 12Mb file from the 1.26Mb .jpg? Seems a bit odd (and heavy handed?)

Tom, out of interest, are you able to explain why the .jpg was created at 22:03pm and the picture.bmp and its .dds file were created at 22:20pm? There are later .jpg files (up to 22:57pm) that don't have an equivalent .bmp file. Just curious.

Well, two weeks ago I found a 50Mb skin (Picture.bmp) in my cache folder (saw it when cleaning out for beta patch 2). It contained a spit with a naked chick and some other junk. It seems like the game itself creates the Picture.bmp as some temp file. Just try cleaning the cache folder and play some sp-mission - you will find a 12 mb bmp file then too of a default spitfire or so. Seems like it cleans the cache sometimes so it doesn't happen all the time.

As the 50Mb file naturally was an online skin and not the spitgirl I also realized it was the last temp file after my game crashed while playing on the Repka server... And as 12.5 x 4 = 50 one can guess that some online guy had created a skin that was 4000x4000 instead of 2000x2000? That would give a 50 mb tmp file for a skin if the default ones result in 12.5 mb...

I mailed this bug to Ilya and got a very nice answer where he wanted the contents of my cache folder as he was interested in this happening. To bad I had cleaned it out. I also asked him for a switch to disable skin downloads after this incident...

Just look in the cache folder after your next Repka session. Full of crappy user skins. And people wonder why the game stutters when new users spawn?

Mazex

There are some good skins in there, but those that are just totally out of reality (Bright red spitfires?) are freakin retarded.

Cheat?
 

I bet that's an online cheat. That's why Ilya wants to see them.

Now if the player names were stored with the downloaded skins....

56RAF_phoenix

Wha?
I don't follow, how do you mean a cheat?

It's the "invoke spirit of manfred" hack. Simply colour your mount bright red and your bullets do 10x damage...

Presumably adorning yourself with a 4096x4096 skin will give any opponent just that little extra bit of lag when they get you in their sights. Just enough for you to get away....

I dont know, i am not a programmer. It seems, the jpg is downloaded from the Internet, but the .dds is used. Why convert that much later? Maybe the CPU was busy with something else before it. I do not know. What I also noticed that when we flying a team, we have a quarter or half an hour elapsed before the skins are first shown.

The file size is no problem. The .bmp is a uncompressed file type, which is faster to work (despite the fact that the hard disk's size is bigger). If you make a clear white picture, 2048 pixel x 2048 pixel, 72 dpi, 8 bit RGB file format, and you save in bmp format, it will be 12MB. The jpg file is a compressed type. The size depends on the picture colors, quality, etc. With different procedures will be smaller in size, but the image quality is worse. With strong copress, it will be Blurry, grainy. On the Wikipedia there are articles about them if interested.

Im not tried yet, but it is possible? The official skins is 2048x2048 jpg, the program allowed to use bigger pictures?

My skin was 1.5 MB too, now is 150k. If you are using photoshop, save the jpg with this: File menu \ Save for web & devices" submenu. Here you can easily adjust the compress rate (even 50% is good), you can see the results real time, and you can see the size of the jpg in the bottom left corner.

Hey you didn't tell us how was that Spit chick. Damn 50Mb worth a good zoom :rolleyes:

That's maybe why Ilya wanted to have it ;)

/mazex

Lol

Another original one.

Let me says that I had some unpleasing words rushing out of my mouth seeing that in my cache folder :evil:

This is simply stupid only. I hate it more when Allied aircraft uses gray skin with yellow nose. Thats annoying at distance. :evil: