What's the size of your plugins folder?

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Well, an SSD is a big box of solid state memory, but the system will treat it like a disk for all intents and purposes.  The TLC for it is different, however, so read the manual.  Think of it as a disk with no seek time and no latency.  It will run at channel speed, so if you have an external one, make it a USB 3 port if you can.

[Shark7 118]

Play folder (utilizing the DatPacker to condense a number of the files) 7GB

 

Unpacked folder (the back up): 9.87GB

 

This is constantly growing as I keep finding things I like and adding them. No I don't have everything, I shudder to think how much disk space it would take to install every lot available between the various content sites. 

[Sabretooth78 808]

I've actually started to go back through mine to create an index of what I have vs. and which dependency files/sets are needed for each one.  That way if I remove something, I'll readily be able to tell what (if any) dependencies I can also remove.  It's a bit tedious and it's going to take a while, but well worth the effort.  That and I'm finding the new file tagging introduced into OS X to be very helpful - this is my first real foray into using those.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Still under a terabyte at 989.4 MB.

 

I don't see the use of having gigantic plugins folders.  They must be pretty much unmanageable.  The "gee, that's pretty" syndrome is expensive of disk space and personal time.  How many of these umpteen lots are actually in use?

[tonyr 926]

Went from 1.98 GB to 1.92 after some cleaning!

[Sabretooth78 808]

Still under a terabyte at 989.4 MB.

 

I don't see the use of having gigantic plugins folders.  They must be pretty much unmanageable.  The "gee, that's pretty" syndrome is expensive of disk space and personal time.  How many of these umpteen lots are actually in use?

 

I'm very heavy on R and C growables (along with as many decent I as are available), so usage is really a matter for the game to decide.  I like those because they're instant variety and I don't really have to think about them.  I'm usually pretty picky, too, I don't just download random junk.  Interestingly I don't use most of my own stuff, but that's mostly a function of my aversion to plopping functional buildings and the fact that I suck at lotting.

 

My motivation for indexing, however, (which I should have done from the start - live and learn - and it could be argued everybody *should* do) is if I decide to purge say a GB of them, I don't want to leave another "gimme" 100 MB or whatever of content floating around in my dependencies that I would no longer need.

 

Most of the rest are civics, park sets and Peg's theme sets.  Again, for variety.  I haven't gotten advanced enough in any cities to really put any of it to use.  My philosophy is I would rather something that looks attractive and then go to try and actually use it and remove it (say it no longer suits my tastes, it's not functional in the way I first thought it would be, or I just plain never use it) then never have it.  Call it a hangup on opportunity cost.

 

I could easily indiscriminately hack another GB off and my loading times aren't going to change significantly enough for me to care...or reduce CTDs (any are too many)...that and I *only* have 440 free GB on my laptop (out of 500) so it doesn't really hurt to hold onto the stuff.

 

I'll stop downloading stuff when the community stops producing excellent content!

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I suspect that I've downloaded about one lot per week lately as they come out on the front page.  However, I try to restrict lots that have a large number of dependencies I don't already have.

[Turjan 1,048]

Still under a terabyte at 989.4 MB.

 

I don't see the use of having gigantic plugins folders.  How many of these umpteen lots are actually in use?

 

Talking about terabytes, I wonder how much space all my Simcity 4 files take up on my harddisk. Not a terabyte, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was 50 GB or more.

 

Your question regarding how many of these lots are in use is a good one. The game seems to play favorites. There certainly is enough stuff that I never see in game in my plugin folder. Also, there's these plugins where I wanted to have one piece out of dozens that get installed alongside. I guess I should probably spend some time in the Reader.

[Shark7 118]

Still under a terabyte at 989.4 MB.

 

I don't see the use of having gigantic plugins folders.  They must be pretty much unmanageable.  The "gee, that's pretty" syndrome is expensive of disk space and personal time.  How many of these umpteen lots are actually in use?

 

I agree having a ton of ploppable buildings is more of a pain than it is worth.  There are some that I consider a requirement, but I prefer growables as they will eventually appear in game at some point and I don't have to search through a list of umpteen lots in my landmarks menu to find and use them.  My poor parks menu...well that's a bit frightening. 

 

My folder would likely be larger if not for the fact that I tend to delete any ploppable lot of a BAT that has both grow and plop lots, since I really only want the growables anyway.

[Turjan 1,048]

My folder would likely be larger if not for the fact that I tend to delete any ploppable lot of a BAT that has both grow and plop lots, since I really only want the growables anyway.

 

You can  plop any growable anyway, so there's no real need for ploppables that also come as growables, except for residentials you want to use as landmarks.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

@Turjan:  My total space for SC4 is: 2 GB exactly at the moment.

 

Thought you might be interested in how I find this out.

[Sabretooth78 808]

All told, I'm probably running around 20-25 GB, most of which I keep on an external HDD attached to my HTPC (a mid-2011 MacMini I use more as a home server than anything).  That would include the game itself, regions, active plugins (compressed & uncompressed), inactive plugins (download copies and items "quarantined" for evaluation/testing), old BAT projects, etc.  Whatever volume is allocated to Time Machine backups would be in addition to that total (not aware of a real good way to compute that) - I'm guessing that would bring the total up around 60-65 GB.  Even more when you add in screenshots and CJ material.  I've never really thought about the total overhead before; now I'm curious so that'll be something to do later.

 

I also have 150 MB of "legacy" plugin downloads from my original run with custom content back in 2003-2005 including some stuff I'm not even sure is available any more.  I just haven't had the opportunity to run through it to see if there's anything worth keeping.

 

Chugging along on my plugin index spreadsheet - figure I'm about 20% done.  Once I get through the SimGoober and jestarr stuff I'll be home free .  Pegasus, too, but his stuff is mostly autonomous so I'm saving that for last.  It's tedious but I have to say worthwhile.  Of course I don't have to do it all at once but I sniff space savings and I'm still motivated.  Bring it.  I've already found a few anachronisms and a couple of other lots where I was missing some optional plugins.  Don't read the readmes - read them twice!  I'm also finding several files I had modded and not renamed/tagged in some way.  I must have been asleep - horrible file management.

[Whte_rbt 1,431]

3.05Gb. Kinda scared myself doing this, the stats pulled up 9112 files across 1704 Folders. I'll admit I'm heavy on the plopables, but I want downtown to look like it does in my head and that means I'm placing the buildings and not the computer.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Is your 3GB pure plugins or is there miscellaneous garbage included?  My tiny suite of just under 1 GB contains no files that are not converted by the game into tables on loading.

[Whte_rbt 1,431]

Call it 90% free from extraneous files. I'm sure there's a few jpegs n txt's kicking around somewhere, I've just never got round hunting the last of them down. I generally only install the files that I actually need when I'm extracting/installing downloads anyway. Just wish everyone would set the installers so that these bloat files appear outside the plugins folder, similar to the way that the NAM documentation turns up in the "My Docs/Sim City 4" folder

[herbigharo32 5]

Just ran a backup of my simcity files.  Total size is 6.2 GB uncompressed.

[Indiana Joe 1,752]

Call it 90% free from extraneous files. I'm sure there's a few jpegs n txt's kicking around somewhere, I've just never got round hunting the last of them down. I generally only install the files that I actually need when I'm extracting/installing downloads anyway. Just wish everyone would set the installers so that these bloat files appear outside the plugins folder, similar to the way that the NAM documentation turns up in the "My Docs/Sim City 4" folder

Hunting down files is easy. Use the search bar in Windows explorer. Search for phrases like "read", "install", and "imag". You can delete right from the search results.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I use the Files2dat program (STEX) to compress individual plugins after I have removed anything I don't want, so my plugins consist mostly of .dat files.  However, I have to go in and work on several of them that I picked up before I discovered this program.  I have no current incentive to do so, but if the total goes over 1 GB it might be enough to make me do this.  I think the extra compression will be slight.

[Metalpuritan 161]

My plugins folder is 3.78GB, this folder is clean and datpacked, there are no .png, .txt, HTML, thumb, none of that, pure, clean unadulterated plugins.  It took me a couple of years to build it too and it is also not the first plugins build I have made but it IS the last.  I still add a few things from time to time but nowadays things that get added go through a quarantine period, usually a month, at the end of the month, the content I deem worthy gets added to my raw plugins folder back-up and then it gets datpacked and I replace my old plugins folder with the new one.  I patch my plugins folder as if it were a new modern game getting patched by a developer, I even have my own file structure.  for every creator, they each have their own folder named after them, with an exception to BSC creators because they get their own folder inside the BSC main folder and there are so many BSC creators and so much awesome BSC content that I just let them slide(when datpacking because the BSC folder is so big, the datpacker creates 2 folders for the BSC folder).  With such great time, effort and care put into my plugins folder it is no wonder I do not get crashes or have any brown boxes.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

You are to be commended.

 

Care and feeding of a plugin suite is one of the principle ways to make sure you won't have problems.  Generally, it is well to test each and every add.  I sometimes accept them in groups from known makers, but I still test.

 

Any CTDs I get are usually caused by the loose nut holding on to the keyboard.

[Compdude787 916]

Any CTDs I get are usually caused by the loose nut holding on to the keyboard.

Same with me. Except it's the loose nut holding the mouse and moving a puzzle piece over a transit-enabled lot. That's the only time the game ever CTDs for me. The other time it's crashed was when I didn't have the -CPUCount parameter set to 1 in the target command line.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I've had an interesting experience with setting up a multi-tasking experiment.  I can get SC4 to run at 120% (60% of each of two cores), but the frequency of crashes increases so dramatically that the game is not worth the candle.

 

After recent adds, my plugin suite now occupies 990.7 MB.  It is getting to be time for a review.

[pieuponieu 70]

1.83 GB and counting.  Game's still loading pretty fast (maybe 60 secs) and is more stable on my current installation (Steam) and PC than ever before.  Knock wood.  Also, I figured out how to run the game in widescreen at 1920 x 1080.  The menus are small, but I can see so much of the city!

[pieuponieu 70]

I take it back.  I just clocked the game startup, and it took 42 seconds.  I'm still amazed by that.

[Sabretooth78 808]

 

Call it 90% free from extraneous files. I'm sure there's a few jpegs n txt's kicking around somewhere, I've just never got round hunting the last of them down. I generally only install the files that I actually need when I'm extracting/installing downloads anyway. Just wish everyone would set the installers so that these bloat files appear outside the plugins folder, similar to the way that the NAM documentation turns up in the "My Docs/Sim City 4" folder

Hunting down files is easy. Use the search bar in Windows explorer. Search for phrases like "read", "install", and "imag". You can delete right from the search results.

 

Cleanitol also installs with a file that searches for unusable extensions, and you can modify it to add any others you may have.  Thumbs.db, Desktop.ini (windows) and .DS_Store (mac) files can be especially proliferate.

[naftixe 131]

At my height in 2010, 5GB+. Right now about 1.6GB.

[GDK 20]

8gb mods 8gb ram on computer lol it still works tho

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

8gb mods 8gb ram on computer lol it still works tho

You do realize that your eight gigs of plugins get reduced to a lot less space in tables, I trust.  The amount of RAM you have above 3 GB is irrelevant and you can use it for other things.

 

My lean and mean plugins folder is still holding at 0.9928 GB.

[skylar15 3]

1.20 GB, half of it being BSC.

[GDK 20]

 

8gb mods 8gb ram on computer lol it still works tho

You do realize that your eight gigs of plugins get reduced to a lot less space in tables, I trust.  The amount of RAM you have above 3 GB is irrelevant and you can use it for other things.

 

My lean and mean plugins folder is still holding at 0.9928 GB.

 

the patch to make simcity 4 use more than 4gb ram breaks my game sadly