FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Hi!

Question:
When starting a server, does MT load ALL textures and sound located in the folders or does it just load all REFERENCED media via lua codes in all the loaded mods?

Can using alias for textures speed things up if there are redundant textures in different mods?

Example:

mobs:beef, mobs:meat, mobs:porkchop -->mobs:meat
or
other instance like:
texture from default:<anytexture.png> to be aliased into mod:<modtexture.png>

I am asking because I would like to consolidate certain redundant textures on my ESM server to make it load faster and run better.

Thank you for the help in advance!

-mm

I think it loads it all at load-time. You can symlink files to save storage space on your server, but minetest will still have to allocate for two things, and load twice.

Textures are all in a global... namespace? Thingy. Anyway, if the textures are the same, just give them the same name, I would think. Edit: I mean delete the duplicates, and use the one textures wherever.

From what I've noticed the server itself just loads the .lua and other config files. Its the client that loads the textures and audio etc. Consolidating the textures should in theory help with the load times as there will be less textures that the server has to send to the client.

DI3HARD139 wrote:From what I've noticed the server itself just loads the .lua and other config files. Its the client that loads the textures and audio etc. Consolidating the textures should in theory help with the load times as there will be less textures that the server has to send to the client.

Consolidating the textures (ie. putting them in a pre-generated atleas) decreases maintainability and moddability of the textures. This is ultimately why even Minecraft went away from such a texturing scheme; now, the texture files are individual rather than put in an atlas. Moreover, this isn't consistent with what other modern games do.

If you want to decrease the file size of textures, try running OptiPNG on all mod textures.

Thanks for sharing that @Calinou. I was wondering if there was a program for re-compressing the textures.