Revolutionary Loading Screen Mod

[boformer 3,169]

I just saw this mod popping up:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=667342976

It displays custom asset loading progress and modifies the loading behavior (load only assets used in your cities).

And the best feature: It supports texture sharing between assets, which decreases memory requirements.

[Dubai Skyscraper 129]

Finally! This is exactly what I was waiting for! Does the mod by any chance speed up the asset editor, too? (One reason for why I stopped making assets for C:S were the terrible loading times in the asset editor. So if this is finally resolved I might consider to continue my work)

[Koesj 659]

10 minutes ago, Dubai Skyscraper said:

Finally! This is exactly what I was waiting for! Does the mod by any chance speed up the asset editor, too? (One reason for why I stopped making assets for C:S were the terrible loading times in the asset editor. So if this is finally resolved I might consider to continue my work)

Don't be held back by the modded game's loading times! A -noWorkshop toggle at game start will get you into the Asset Editor pronto for quick checks and tweaks.

[thale5 58]

1 hour ago, Dubai Skyscraper said:

Finally! This is exactly what I was waiting for! Does the mod by any chance speed up the asset editor, too? (One reason for why I stopped making assets for C:S were the terrible loading times in the asset editor. So if this is finally resolved I might consider to continue my work)

Unfortunately not. Currently the mod supports the New Game and Load Game loading modes only. I have of course tested it with all editors, and it works, but I decided to not support them. The reasoning here is that the speed up, if any, comes from custom texture / material / mesh sharing, and in the editors, there isn't much to share, I think. I am assuming here you don't keep many assets enabled when starting editing.

A second reason is the required support. There are several editors in the game already and if there are specific issues, it is difficult to address everything.

[Avanya 2,605]

This is really good new!   Just a question about the shared things - does it identify duplicates from name or what? As in do we asset creators need to keep something in mind for texture sharing for example or does it recognise identical texture from "looking" at them? 

[Drosovila 86]

Id love to know this too. If it really works like that and enough people use it, I "can" finally start working on my high tech industryy assets again  

[thale5 58]

1 hour ago, Avanya said:

This is really good new!   Just a question about the shared things - does it identify duplicates from name or what? As in do we asset creators need to keep something in mind for texture sharing for example or does it recognise identical texture from "looking" at them? 

I have good news on this one. The game calculates a 128 bit MD5 checksum for every resource. I did not invent that, the checksums are already there. What is more, the checksums are available early in the data stream, so it is easy to identify duplicates before loading them.

This of course means that the matches must be exact. Change one pixel and it becomes different.

[Avanya 2,605]

Awesome!  That should mean a bunch of my props will share the same textures, as they are identical.

[Matthias King 348]

This sounds extremely useful. In fact that might be underselling it if it actually works as well as it's supposed to.

[Macronomicus 128]

Such a great thing, thanks Thale!  I wasnt even aware texture sharing didnt happen. 

[Macronomicus 128]

I got a massive speed boost to startup, it went from about 5-6 min to about 1-2 min!  And I actually added assets from the last time I played lol this is brilliant, and the loading screen no longer poops its pants when switching to mod loading mode half way thru.

Is there an output log generated somewhere? I had loads of missing props and several broken assets, but they all went by so fast I couldn't keep track.

EDIT:  Also I noticed one thing with your issue with the LOD & shared tex option, it seems to be placing the reflection image thats used on glass (the one everyone hates lol) perhaps some naming issue is occurring.

[Kaschperl 92]

Thanks for creating this mod, @thale5! I've tried it and it seemed to work fine, except for one bug that occured:

Spoiler

Some of the buildings have glitchy LODs now, they only show the variation colour. The HQ models are fine. The green, red and purple buildings you can see in the screenshot are a vanilla commercial asset, not a downloaded one. I used the mod with all five options enabled.

[Judazzz 1,936]

I noticed the same issue as Kaschperl mentioned, glitched LOD models. At first I though the problem was caused my own mod I'm currently working on (it touches graphics, so I thought I messed something up), but thankfully it wasn't - well, at least for me...
This mod is really quite something, with lots of potential, but for the time being I'm going to keep it shelved until the inevitable 'First version'-issues have been stamped out.

[Ryno917 102]

Great news!

[Simulanten 681]

This is definitely going into the right direction. It's great that the loading black box is opened and I see great potential.

Still there are too many issues until now - The LOD problem but I also got assets that didn't load although I definitely used them in the save game (Some of the essential like the custom asset fire trucks...).

Like Judazzz I'll deactivate the mod for the time being - but it definitely is a big step for mankind!

[thale5 58]

17 hours ago, Macronomicus said:

I got a massive speed boost to startup, it went from about 5-6 min to about 1-2 min!  And I actually added assets from the last time I played lol this is brilliant, and the loading screen no longer poops its pants when switching to mod loading mode half way thru.

Is there an output log generated somewhere? I had loads of missing props and several broken assets, but they all went by so fast I couldn't keep track.

EDIT:  Also I noticed one thing with your issue with the LOD & shared tex option, it seems to be placing the reflection image thats used on glass (the one everyone hates lol) perhaps some naming issue is occurring.

That is an excellent speedup, there must be a lot of sharing going on! I wonder what building or prop collections are you using?

For now, open your output_log.txt (in steamapps\common\Cities_Skylines\Cities_Data) and search for "Asset failed" and "Asset not found". A bit inconvenient but they are all there. I am thinking of adding an optional report of failed, missing and used assets as this seems to be the most requested feature.

I must look into the LODs. Probably need to disable some texture sharing there. This requires research.

[thale5 58]

40 minutes ago, Simulanten said:

Still there are too many issues until now - The LOD problem but I also got assets that didn't load although I definitely used them in the save game (Some of the essential like the custom asset fire trucks...).

Can you tell me which assets you noticed missing? Were they all vehicles?

[thale5 58]

Thanks for the reports everyone. I will look into the LOD issue in the near future. As I am not an asset creator myself, I don't have the "eye" for visual glitches like you do. Therefore, I am relying on your reports.

[Simulanten 681]

2 hours ago, thale5 said:

Can you tell me which assets you noticed missing? Were they all vehicles?

Mostly vehicles. But also my own "Overlook Hotel" (that I used the subscribed version of in that savegame)...

I don't have the time right now but I could fire up the game with your mod activated and save the output log.

Thanks!

[Mr_Maison 2,426]

Every now and then I come up for air to do some reading and find I'm a bit late to an awesome party. This is great!

[Darf 1,439]

Looks like a great concept, especially the part where you don't have to activate the assets. That's great for us assetcreators!  Maybe in the future it would be possible to disable loading standard buildings?

[thale5 58]

30 minutes ago, Darf said:

Looks like a great concept, especially the part where you don't have to activate the assets. That's great for us assetcreators!  Maybe in the future it would be possible to disable loading standard buildings?

Interesting idea. The standard prefab collections (a.k.a scenes) are rather huge (you see them loading before and after custom assets). By skipping one scene, you skip many standard assets. I'm afraid that may break the game but I will try that at some point.

[Judazzz 1,936]

37 minutes ago, Darf said:

Looks like a great concept, especially the part where you don't have to activate the assets. That's great for us assetcreators!  Maybe in the future it would be possible to disable loading standard buildings?

Now that would be a killer feature - just imagine how much leeway you'd have by only using a select few vanilla assets (I think I'd omit at least half of all growables, possibly even 75% - not necessarily because they are all bad [some are, though], but many simply don't fit a USA-themed city).

[Matthias King 348]

9 hours ago, Judazzz said:

Now that would be a killer feature - just imagine how much leeway you'd have by only using a select few vanilla assets (I think I'd omit at least half of all growables, possibly even 75% - not necessarily because they are all bad [some are, though], but many simply don't fit a USA-themed city).

Agreed. Being able to unload any and all vanilla buildings would be a great feature. There are a lot I'd keep, but at least a handful I'd leave off the list.

[Simulanten 681]

Oh yes. 'Unsubscribing' vanilla assets would speed up my loading times greatly. And with my flora consisting almost entirely of Magician Maison's trees I need a way to get rid of some vanilla ones (like the horrible fluorescent slimy-green bush) that spoil so many great workshop assets. 

On a side note: I suggest not to include plants & trees on custom asset plots (at least for ploppables) - leave it to the user to choose the flora of their liking and taste... There are great mods to do that!

[Macronomicus 128]

Such a sweet spot you've tapped into,  if we could reuse all the vanilla textures, and have modders share more textures, maybe even have a couple texture packs etc, that should really boost speed considerably.  Lots of potential in this mod, my game is already faster, I had to disable the shared textures, but its still faster loading than before, and the loading screen is hugely improved!

There are a couple vanilla buildings I'd like to block too, I thought that was possible already tho? 

[Judazzz 1,936]

If texture packs would be possible, could having the same assets being able to use various 'texture packs' be the next step? Like for example Feindbild's Brooklyn collection: one texture pack for the current visual style, another pack for a 'red brick' style, one for a 'brownstone' style, one for a 'wooden panel facades' style, and so on and on....

Afaik. the only way to 'block' vanilla buildings is to create a 'master theme' applied as a city policy, which would only include assets you want to allow to spawn in your city - like a city-wide asset baseline. Then you could still override that with more specific themes on district level.
This eliminates the chance of undesirable assets popping up in your city, but unfortunately these unwanted ones would still be loaded into memory.
Maybe the 'Load used assets' option of the Loading Screen mod could take care of that, which, if I understand the function correctly, only allows buildings already present in your city to load (but if so, how to get new subscriptions to load?) - it would require you to grow each allowed growable at least once in your city, however.

[Avanya 2,605]

Different textures for the same building/model is already possible. Say you have the Brooklyn buildings + versions in red brick. The model share option of this mod would then see they share models and would only load one of each model and then all the textures (as they're different). I think they'd still have to be created as separate buildings, but only the new textures would load. Just like if you edit one of the default buildings now the mod would only load the model and textures once (if all options are on ofc).

[thale5 58]

2 hours ago, Judazzz said:

If texture packs would be possible, could having the same assets being able to use various 'texture packs' be the next step? Like for example Feindbild's Brooklyn collection: one texture pack for the current visual style, another pack for a 'red brick' style, one for a 'brownstone' style, one for a 'wooden panel facades' style, and so on and on....

Afaik. the only way to 'block' vanilla buildings is to create a 'master theme' applied as a city policy, which would only include assets you want to allow to spawn in your city - like a city-wide asset baseline. Then you could still override that with more specific themes on district level.
This eliminates the chance of undesirable assets popping up in your city, but unfortunately these unwanted ones would still be loaded into memory.
Maybe the 'Load used assets' option of the Loading Screen mod could take care of that, which, if I understand the function correctly, only allows buildings already present in your city to load (but if so, how to get new subscriptions to load?) - it would require you to grow each allowed growable at least once in your city, however.

"Texture pack" reminds me of materials because that is what materials are: a set of textures, a shader, and possibly other material properties. The mod already shares custom materials when present. I believe sharing Unity materials is a very efficient way to share resources, and it might be very difficult to go beyond that stage.

The suggested usage of "'Load used assets" is the following (and yes, it only applies to custom assets):

• Because of the option, all the assets placed in your city will be loaded, even though you may have disabled many of them in Content Manager.
• You also check the "Load enabled assets" option. In Content Manager, you enable your current favorites, i.e. the ones you want to use and experiment with at this time. This set can be relatively small and change all the time because, as noted above, "Load used assets" will take care of the rest.

[Judazzz 1,936]

2 hours ago, Avanya said:

Different textures for the same building/model is already possible. Say you have the Brooklyn buildings + versions in red brick. The model share option of this mod would then see they share models and would only load one of each model and then all the textures (as they're different). I think they'd still have to be created as separate buildings, but only the new textures would load. Just like if you edit one of the default buildings now the mod would only load the model and textures once (if all options are on ofc).

Ooh, on paper that sounds pretty Would be great to be able to generate 'sub-instances' (or clones if you will) of asset models, to which different textures could be applied - how to generate and register those instances to make them initialize and become persistent properly I have no clue, though (perhaps assets and their differently textured instances could be stored in an .xml file, which could be set up through a Building Themes-like panel [select an asset, create an instance and reference it to a locally stored texture variety]?)

Man, at times like this I wish I was a better programmer  


Oh, and thank you for your explanation, Thale!