Maximum size of mods?

Arralen · #1 February 9th, 2010, 07:27 AM

Yeah, folks, I know, it surely has been asked before, but I just couldn' find it ... so here's the ultimate question again:

What's the maximum size of a single mod (file) that dominions is able to handle?

Let's say I'm going to touch every unit/spells/item in the game, and have plenty of comments and everything - that will surely result in a file of over a hundred thousand lines or more, and several MB in size.
At what point (if at all) is Dom3 going to choke?
Would deviding it up in smaller files help at all?

thanks

Sombre · #2 February 9th, 2010, 08:40 AM

I can't see why dominions would care about the size of the .dm file.

If you put absolutely everything into the dm, it would still be tiny, because it's just plain text. You'd need to pump the text file full of filler and push it to some insane size to stand a chance of breaking anything.

Foodstamp · #3 February 9th, 2010, 09:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arralen

Yeah, folks, I know, it surely has been asked before, but I just couldn' find it ... so here's the ultimate question again:

What's the maximum size of a single mod (file) that dominions is able to handle?

Let's say I'm going to touch every unit/spells/item in the game, and have plenty of comments and everything - that will surely result in a file of over a hundred thousand lines or more, and several MB in size.
At what point (if at all) is Dom3 going to choke?
Would deviding it up in smaller files help at all?

thanks

I have a mod that is similar to what you are wanting and I have not broke the game yet. The mod file is 563k and runs next to a modified version of Burnsaber's Bretonia which is 63k. That 563k contains changes to all pretenders, all battle spells, most non combat spells, all nations, many nation recruitables. It adds many new magic sites and units complete with descriptions, some new spells, weapons, armors and mod nations. I would be surprised if your mod tops 1 meg with commenting.

So put your mind at rest! You should have no problem running a mod that size. You are more likely to reach the description limitations than you are to blow up the game.

BTW I have had my mod in smaller chunks and I plan on switching back just because it is a lot easier to find what you are looking for, even with ctrl-f it becomes a pain to make changes in a large mod. When I break it back down it will be 33 mods. So go wild, if you do find a limitation let us know!

Gandalf Parker · #4 February 9th, 2010, 11:37 AM

LLama server has a number of uploaded mods that are compilations of many other mods. The Compressed Nations mod puts 11 nations together. I think there is one that puts many of Sombres nations and CBm together. Ive run Chaos mods that changed one random thing on every unit in the game.

All of those are very large. But if you were to hit the new limits anywhere with a mod I think it would be specific. A text-only mod would be different than one with many images? Adding new things (equip, sites, units) to the game might hit a different limit also. Text descriptions storage would probably be another factor. Im not sure what the lowest of them would be but even if you hit it, there might be a way to work around that limit and continue the project.

Its also hard to search on the subject because limits that were hit were often increased.

pyg · #5 February 9th, 2010, 02:19 PM

The mod for this MP game (currently turn 9) is ~650k and contains 8 mod nations which introduce 374 units, 20 magic sites, 146 weapons, 50 armors, 123 spells, and 510 sprites in addition to making 12048 lines worth of changes via CBM. All of the above numbers have hard limits, but hard limit for the total size of a mod seems very large. I have not experienced it.

lch · #6 February 10th, 2010, 04:26 AM

The files are being loaded into memory dynamically, so the limit to the mod file size is either 2GB/4GB to address it, or your available system memory. In other words, pretty much unbounded for all practical purposes and you're probably going to hit one of the other limits that the game imposes before you get trouble with the file size.

BigDaddy · #7 February 16th, 2010, 05:11 PM

If I held the z key down (zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...) how long would it take me to fill a non-compressed GB text file?

I did 210 z's in 10 seconds. Each is one 2 bytes. It would take 551 days, give or take of holding the z key down with an object to fill this file. So, you'll hit the limit in 750 days or more, and your file will be 500,000 or 1 billion+ (possibly much more) characters long. Even then, it's likely the computer would just store the file on a swap on the hard drive as virtual memory... It is unlikely that other arrays in the program could handle all this information.

Arralen · #8 February 17th, 2010, 09:40 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BigDaddy

It is unlikely that other arrays in the program could handle all this information.

And THAT'S the problem - not if Windoze can handle the file size, but if Dom3 actually can read it in completely, withouth running into buffer overflows etc. .

But if everyone agrees that they didn't hit any limit no matter what they did, I'll be reassured and sleep fine again.

Gandalf Parker · #9 February 17th, 2010, 11:02 AM

It appears to be a rule of modding/mapping in general that there will always be a "low cap" that the modders are fighting. Fixing it just moves the fight to the next low cap.

But I think most are pretty cranked in Dom3 at the moment. The last "wish it was more" limitation I remember had to do with lists of names.

Stavis_L · #10 February 17th, 2010, 11:12 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

It appears to be a rule of modding/mapping in general that there will always be a "low cap" that the modders are fighting. Fixing it just moves the fight to the next low cap.

But I think most are pretty cranked in Dom3 at the moment. The last "wish it was more" limitation I remember had to do with lists of names.

Hrm...off hand, I can think of three internal limits that can frequently cause problems when running mods in conjunction.

1) Custom spell limit. There is actually quite little headroom here (a few dozen is all; not a problem for any single mod, but can definitely be an issue for a multi-mod nation game.)
2) Custom names - only 2 custom lists available explicitly; re-use of name lists restricted to nations from other eras (e.g. re-using Bogarus' lists) can get you a few more, depending on the era, but conflicts in name lists are very problematic (although not very game breaking.) Not to mention that this is the only way to guarantee a specific hero-name.
3) Custom sites. Admittedly, this is really only a problem if you use the magic site mod.

The limits for custom units, armor, weapons seem to have enough headroom to accommodate quite a few concurrent mods (even big ones such as CBM) without issues.