Spring RTS Engine

A general tip for all modders on windows platforms: (all of us, I imagine...)

When you've compiled the release build of your mod, go into the folders in the zip with either bmp or jpg images, and look for a file called Thumbs.db, and DELETE IT!

These thumbs.db files are crap generated by windows so you can preview images faster, but they bloat mod sizes by a lot - especially with mods that use 3do units in any form (they load every single unit texture file into this thumbs.db for faster viewing). For example: in Gundam 1.1, these thumbs.db files add just over 1mb to the total file size. In E&E they add about the same. Removing this windows crap is how I got the 1944 demo (oh so long ago..) to just under 4mb - with them, it was over 5.5mb.

I know ~1mb seems trivial these days, but its just useless windows crap that is wasting bandwidth, so nuke thumbs.db!

PS: my apologies to Smoth (Gundam) and Fang (E&E) for using them as examples; those (and SWS and 1944) are what I have in my mod folder right now.

I am not offended

everyone should be using 2xexplorer anyway...

I'll use windows as I always do.

Forboding Angel wrote:everyone should be using Thunar anyway...

Fixed.

More seriously, explorer replacements suck and I think there's an option to not generate thumbs.db somewhere.

Tools -> Folder Options -> View Tab -> Do Not Cache Thumbnails checkbox. I can't believe compression tools are dumb enough to add that file since it has both hidden & system tags on, not to mention they should know it won't be needed on the other end.

The tools just assume you know what you're doing and IMO it's better they add unnecessary files than leave out important ones.

ZellSF wrote:

Forboding Angel wrote:everyone should be using UltraExplorer anyway...

Fixed.

McLoud wrote:

ZellSF wrote:

Forboding Angel wrote:everyone should be using DOS anyway...

Fixed.

fixed.

STOP FIXING IT, THE WHOLE FIXED MEME IS GAY

I doubt most people here are old enough or poor enough to have ever used DOS seriously. No offense to others who have.

Depends on what you mean seriously. I've used DOS lots for games. If that's not using it seriously I haven't ever used Mac OS X, Linux or Windows seriously either :P

I don't see how that's revelant to file managers or thumbs.db at all though.

neddiedrow wrote:I doubt most people here are old enough or poor enough to have ever used DOS seriously. No offense to others who have.

Lol! I'm 27 and I played lots of the dos games, right from the start.

hell, I even used a ZX spectrum (48k). I seriously wonder how people manage to use so much ram these days. games back then worked fine with 48k.

neddiedrow wrote:I doubt most people here are old enough or poor enough to have ever used DOS seriously. No offense to others who have.

I doubt most people here know that DOS supports piping stdout to files.

I do most gaming on my Atari 2600 when I'm at home. River Raid anybody?

Pitfall is ftw!

You forgot to mention only XP users are affected.

KDR_11k wrote:

neddiedrow wrote:I doubt most people here are old enough or poor enough to have ever used DOS seriously. No offense to others who have.

I doubt most people here know that DOS supports piping stdout to files.

I do. It's the fastest way to create a list of your warez and pron... "dir /o > stuff.txt" :P

neddiedrow wrote:I doubt most people here are old enough or poor enough to have ever used DOS seriously. No offense to others who have.

KDR_11k wrote:I doubt most people here know that DOS supports piping stdout to files.

27 year old programmer who learned programming using turbo c++ and I read a lot of the header files when I used them. I didn't like using C though.

Old Turbo C 25 old user here as well, as well as turbo pascal (what an awesome IDE at the time). I don't really like C, but C++ isn't looking that bad after all those years... and yes, DOS really has it's uses, specially if you combine then with the gnu tools providing linux like pipe ready commands and regexps.

Programming for DOS is fun so long as you don't want to do anything that eats more than 640KB of memory, then it becomes a bit less amusing.

neddiedrow wrote:I doubt most people here are old enough or poor enough to have ever used DOS seriously. No offense to others who have.

Dos 5 was the first OS I seriously used. You young whipper-snappers haven't lived till you've had to go through your command.com and autoexec.bat to get enough lower memory to play an Origin game like Wing Commander Privateer. You folks have no idea how mindblowing memmaker was.