Matrix Games Forums

Hi everyone. I'll start off by saying I just bought the game a few days ago thanks to the awesome sale going on right now. I'm really loving the game so far. Have been checking the forums for mods and glad to see so many great ones, especially the the Star Trek mods. Big thanks out to Igard and his mods since I'm a huge Star Trek fan and was looking primarily for Trek mods.

I've been getting into the modding for this game and I see that game performance can be an issue because of the bigger file sizes of PNG files for most mods for people. My PC is pretty hardcore but I always want the best experience so I found this easy to use website called TinyPNG @ tinypng.org
It's easy to use and super quick too. You can drag and drop PNG files and as long as they're under 2 MB and 20 or less at a time it's a cinch. Plus I was getting files reduced by 65% to 70%! Hopefully this will help with planet/moon mods and the like. Fastest and easiest way I found so far with results! If anyone has another and better method to share please feel free. Keep up the hard work modders!!!

Welcome to the forums Rico, I'm glad you like the mods, hopefully I'll get more work done on them soon. I resized all my png files for the Picard Era mod for Legends to their original sizes as the performace was starting to become an issue. I'm in the process of updating the remaining mods now too.

You can find a good selection of planet replacement textures if you download the Picard Era total conversion mod. This mod is different from the Picard mod itself in that it replaces existing game files.

Looks a useful website, I'll have to give it a try. Thanks for posting and happy trekking. [:)]

The only way to reduce a level 9 compressed .png is to go lossy with the file. Can understand why some might want to. I guess that site starts reducing the variance in colours used in the file and blurring the image to group like coloured pixels.

Regarding the decrease in performance this isn't down to the .pngs being large as long as they are conforming to the sizes that they are meant to be. like 300x300 race images and the various sizes the ships use. If you increase the size of them bigger so the game has to scale when it pumps in to memory then that can hurt. A lot of mods are using larger sizes than necessary. As long as the size is the same then the mods aren't doing anything the original game is doing but having many more images to handle, which is where most performance issues would come from.
Personally I don't notice any performance issues with mods.

Yea I noticed that too. The galaxy background images were crashing my game when I loaded it. Had to change their size from 5000x5000 to the original 2000x2000 and it worked perfectly after that. Haven't had a performance issues yet myself but I just wanted to put it out there for any who might.