New models have been arriving with better and better texture sets, and that carries a cost you do not see until somebody tries to play on an ordinary machine. So it was time to do what every game does: let you turn them down.
There are now three levels — low, medium and high — in Settings › General. They apply on restart, and the setting lives on your computer rather than your account: the same player can log in from a weak laptop and from a tower without fighting themselves.
But the interesting part showed up while measuring
Before designing anything, we measured what was there. The first count was wrong.
Estimating from resolutions gave 912 MB of video memory. Loading every texture one by one and asking the card what format it actually had gave 1,832 MB. Twice as much.
The reason: 308 of the 311 textures were going in uncompressed. Godot leaves a mark on every new texture saying “when the editor sees you used in a 3D material, switch to compressed”. It is an automatic fix that only fires by opening the editor and touching the scene. This project builds from the command line, so it had never fired. Not once.
Compressing them costs 0.146 out of 255 of mean difference on the worst of twenty models. It is invisible. And it took away more than half the total.
| Video memory | |
|---|---|
| What was really there | 1,832 MB |
| High | 621 MB |
| Medium | 219 MB |
| Low | 81 MB |
Resolution goes by ROLE, not by one global number
The temptation is to set a cap and apply it to everything. That is wrong in both directions, and two cases from the game itself show why:
- A cruiser covers 171 pixels of height at combat range. It was carrying 4096 maps. Twenty-four times more than anyone can see.
- A sky is a 360° panorama. At the game’s field of view you see 21 % of its width, which is 853 texels spread over 1920 pixels of screen. At 4096 it is already short.
So the cap depends on what the texture is for: sky, hull, rock, bullet or interface. The skies stay exactly as they were. The interface is neither compressed nor reduced, because it is drawn at its exact size and compression blocks show up along the edge of an icon.
Medium by default
In flight a hull never exceeds those 171 pixels, so 1024 is still six times more texels than pixels. Nobody will notice the difference while playing; you notice it in the hangar, with the ship a hand’s width from the camera. Anyone who wants the maximum has it one click away.
And something learned along the way: to judge this you have to look up close. Comparing screenshots at normal size suggested “low” looked more like “high” than “medium” did — an impossible result that only meant the card was already using a reduced version at that size and all three converged. That they are indistinguishable in flight is not a flaw in the test: it is precisely the thesis of the whole system.
