Plugin Folder

[DJenterprise 0]

I'm Curious, how large of a Plugin Folder is considered to be a reasonable size to have, What would be considered

to LARGE of a folder.  My Plugin folder after running DatPacker is approx. 10.0Gb

[One Rincon Hill 0]

It depends on how fast your system is. The game just takes a lot longer to load with more plugins, so there's really no limit. I bet some people here have terrabytes in their plugins folder.

[DCMetro34 577]

Just a little hint here....I don't think it's the best idea to datpack your plugins folder......especially the NAM. the NAM will most likely be messed up if you datpack it.....I am not sure how other mods fare though.  

Edit: Here is the official warning for datpacking NAM....

About the size of the folder, it really just depends on how much your computer can handle. My computer doesn't like more than about a gig of plugins before it gets all cranky and starts lagging. So, it's also a matter of how much lag you are prepared to deal with, too. 

DC

[9988 428]

My plugin folder is larger than 2.5 GB

[JeeKTan 4]

2.5GB

[simmaster07 1,221]

How large a plugins folder should be varies between systems. A system with more power, generally, is able to handle more plugins. It comes down to RAM and I/O, really, since the models are stored in memory (RAM) and I/O is the game reading all of the files.

As for DATPacking, theoretically, DATPacking a folder should increase the speed at which the game loads, but not improve gameplay speed, since the game is spending less time loading every file one-by-one and can just access one file with all entries, though it's not recommended to pack the NAM. It could also go either way, since SC4 has to decompress the DAT when it loads it.

Hint: You may (or may not) find it faster to load the game with all readmes, documentation, and images removed.

[ROFLyoshi 1,760]

Mine is only 725MB, but keep in mind I suffered a computer crash, and have had to have started over a week and a half ago.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

200.7MB.  I remove all the junk from my plugins to a separate folder called Documentation.

I use Files2dat to pack individual raw BATs, and sometimes to consolidate invariant stuff.  DAT packer is too indiscriminate for my taste.

I am also unaffected by the "Gee wiz, maybe I can use that sometime".  People with very large plugins are in danger of being unable to run the game.  If you run out of RAM and Swap space for all those tables, you will crash with a page or segment fault.  I only carry plugins that I intend to use.

....

[TekindusT 3,809]

1.75 GB, not much for what we are used to see... I've had to discard some items that I would use only once because 1.75 is A LOT for my very old computer.

[Pipcard 20]

How much plugins can a 1.6 GHz/504 MB of RAM computer have with only 15 GB of free space?

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Well, it depends on how the plugins resolve in RAM.  The program itself is not very big, but its tables can be extensive.  The program places all its tables in memory using typical "more memory" calls to the operating system.  The operating system has some reserved RAM for its tables and modules, and the rest is user space.  Your 504MB probably means that you really have 512MB and the difference is used by your graphics system.  So, now take off your operating system kernel and any required processes and page tables and what's left is for applications.

The systems these days consider the memory and the swap space to be one huge memory space.  for example, my system has 4GB of RAM and 10GB of swap space, so, in effect I have 14GB of RAM.  Nothing is guaranteed.  I just started up Sc4RH and after loading my current city it is occupying 370.9 MB including 207  MB of my plugins.  But the memory occupancy of my machine is 1.7 GB and no swap space is in use.  I have a lot of memory resident stuff right now because I am running a segmentation crash monitor to see if I can catch this program misbehaving.

Now, on that tiny space you have, you can expect the game will take 371-207 = 164 MB plus the real data content of your plugins.  If you have a gigabyte of plugins after removing all the junk, then you need about that much swap space or more.

The disksafe program swaps out mostly, but when it is in core it takes 2.1 MB.

[Terring 6,476]

2,4 gigabytes. It's a little big, right? :-P

[Timewarptrio 0]

Wow, mine is only 113 MB, but I'm trying to keep addons to a minimum on my old, slow computer.

[Simbourgeois 139]

It's always interesting to check... Well, mine is 4.53GB  

But I have some subfolders (for example, "skyskrapers") which I usually remove, if I play European W2W part of my city.

Best regards,

Simbourgeois

Mayor of Belleville

[firehawkordy 28]

Mine is 3.9 gig with 2295 folders, it should be bigger since I've been adding things almost from day one but I have had to remove really dated lots, not to make room but because they just didn't look that good anymore. Since it takes some time to load on this cranky old machine I just read a book, the wait is worth it seeing some of my new downloads growing in my city.

[TimEpke15 56]

MY Plugin folder Searched to load with a time more than 3 minutes

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Originally posted by: firehawkordy

Mine is 3.9 gig with 2295 folders, it should be bigger since I've been adding things almost from day one but I have had to remove really dated lots, not to make room but because they just didn't look that good anymore. Since it takes some time to load on this cranky old machine I just read a book, the wait is worth it seeing some of my new downloads growing in my city.quote>

Of that space, how much is documentation files like .jpeg's and .html, .txt files?  All of that can be moved to a different folder outside the plugins or deleted.  The program initialization routines will have to open and look at each header to find out if it really is a file it wants.  With a little work you can reduce that, and if you use the DATpacker (carefully) or Files2Dat you can cut down a lot by merging BAT related stuff into fewer files.  You might speed up your initialization of the game considerably.