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FSX vs FS9 mdl size...

A

Andrey Tsvirenko

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33
Country
russia
Hello all!

It's became very interesting to me what is the reason of such great size difference between FS9 and FSX mdls (9.68mb! vs 728kb! in default C172)
- what is that price for ?

I notice that the levers, knobs, switches became more smooth, much more, but... 13 times large mdl...

... isn't that indirect reason of low FPS we have ? (I know that in FS9 mdl size have an direct influence to FPS)
 
The new mdl format is based on xml whereas the old mdl was based on bgl. That's one reason. Materials add a lot to the size too. In my experiments with exporting from Max 8 and xtomdl I have noticed that the same mesh with FS10 materials is approx 3MB larger than the same mesh with FS9 materials. [Edit - I just double checked and should make it clear that I was referring to the x-file that the the exporter produces is much larger with FS 10 materials than the same with standard FS9 materials.]
 
Last edited:
Hi,

For some of my scenery MDL files I have seen the size about doubling.

But this is not something to worry about. My first explorations of the new MDL format seem to indicate that a lot has changed internally. The data is now stored in a way that will make it easier for the graphical engine to display it later. So it should actually improve the performance, as the engine has to calculate less.
 
My understanding is that the .mdl file is no longer "compressed." As Arno stated, this should actually result in faster loading and execution of the model, since it doesn't have to be "uncompressed" (among other things)... :D
 
I was not even aware of the fact that they were compressed in the past. I guess my MDL Tweaker II tool must have been decompressing them without me knowing it :D.

But more seriously, the new format indeed stores the data in a way that makes it faster to process. So this means bigger files on the harddisk, but a better performance as return. Does not sound like a bad deal to me.
 
arno said:
I was not even aware of the fact that they were compressed in the past. I guess my MDL Tweaker II tool must have been decompressing them without me knowing it :D.
Click to expand...

Well, it's actually a bit more than simple compression, as there's a LOT of "optimization" that occurs as well (unless you turn it off!).

Using the FS9 MakeMDL a particular project takes up to 20 minutes to export/convert/optimize-compress-compile. The same project compiles with XtoMDL in less than TWO minutes...

Apparently, 18 minutes is used optimizing-compressing.

For my money, having seperate exterior and interior models is a Godsend, as is the elimination of the 4mm vertex limitation in the interior model... :D
 
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