Texture Reduction Pack/TutorialReducing the size of the game textures can provide noticeable performance improvements, both in area-loading and in-game.
Seeing as the game has become more resource-hungry over time, this can provide a benefit even for users with decent machines.
Hanging around in Dunby I go from 43 fps with no mod to 57 fps with 16x16 textures.
The pack gives similar or smaller improvements in most area, but has the potential for some graphical issues (noted at the bottom).
It's not exactly a mind-blowing improvement, but hopefully it can help you.
This first pack only compresses the world, leaving characters and monsters and stuff alone. Use this to try to get faster loading times into maps and such while still being able to fashionogi.
http://rydian.net/downloads/mabinogi/texture_reduction_r287_world.zipThe second pack compresses the world plus characters/clothes/monsters and stuff as well, everything except FX/GUI and faces (to avoid going into the uncanny valley). Use this pack if you're on the most potato of potatoes.
http://rydian.net/downloads/mabinogi/texture_reduction_r287_all.zipOtherwise follow the below tutorial to make your own!
- Rip textures out of the game.
This is done mostly via MabiUnpack or another such tool. Download and run it.
Go to File - Open, and browse to your package folder.
C:\Nexon\Library\mabinogi\appdata\package
That's a common install location but it may vary if you installed Mabi elsewhere (or through Steam).
Find the xxx_full.pack file and open it first.
Go to Extract - All Files and choose a folder for it to dump them into. Repeat this process for each XX_to_XX.pack file in that folder (if you have any), ignore language.pack. You should be dumping the textures to a place that you don't need admin rights to modify, somewhere in your local user account (like your desktop or documents folders), if you're doing this in program files on C:\Nexon\ somewhere you'll likely need to run the various tools and batch files as admin. It's easier to dump the files elsewhere, then simply copy them to your data folder at the end.
Once that's done, go take the later data folders and dump them onto the earlier one in order. So for example if I have 87_full.pack and 87_to_88.pack and 88_to_89.pack, then I'd take 87's folder and dump 87_to_88 ontop of it, then dump 88_to_89 on top of it, and so on.
Now that you have a dump of the latest game data package, go into it and delete everything except the material folder, since that's where all the game's textures are. Also go into the material folder and delete the _define folder, since it doesn't have textures.
And there you have it, a folder with all the game's textures in it.
- Grab proper tools and set them up.
We'll need DDS Utilities and a batch creator for it.
I've prepared a zip containing both of those tools here.
Put them into their own folder, and put the /material/ folder in there too.
- Set up and run the batch job to reduce the textures.
Make a new batch file. If you don't know how, simply open a notepad document for it, but when you save, name it "run.bat" with the quotes.
The contents of the batch file are below.
recomp C:\Users\Rydian\Desktop\data\material -s 0.5 -force
Substitute the folder/path with the one you're using, to point it to the material folder.
Save it, and run it. It should make a second batch file, which we need to modify to make sure the textures don't get too small. As before, edit it with notepad, and we want to modify the second line. Replace it with this.
set params=-prescale 16 16 -RescaleBox -overwrite
If you know what you're doing, feel free to change the dimensions to something higher, but not something lower or you risk mabi crashing.
Then run the second batch file and it should start resizing all the textures, but it might hang up on a few. If you get this type of error...
Simply press enter to skip that texture. You should only have to skip a small number of textures, if it's erroring for every one something might be wrong, check your folder/path settings.
Once that job is finished, it's time to clean up the textures and stick them back in! You'll find the resized textures in a new folder called 0.500.
- Remove problematic textures.
While it may seem fine to stick the textures back in right away, there's likely to be some corrupt/blank ones, so we want to get rid of those first. Open the material folder inside the new folder, and then do a search for dds. This will bring up all the dds files in the material folder. Then you can simply sort the list by filesize to see which ones are 0KB. Delete them.
You may notice that some things look way worse than others... for example eyes look terrible and lots of magic effects are reduced to mere squares. This is because the game doesn't keep all of it's textures separate, it sometimes uses one texture file for many related graphics (akin to a sprite sheet). In this case you can either resize those specific graphics down to something larger than 16x16 (for example 128x128), or not resize them at all, personal preference.
The eye/mouth files are in material\char\face.
The magic/effect files are in material\fx.
Various UI-related things are in material\fx\cursor.
- Put textures into the game.
Now that you have working resized textures, pack them back into the game.
The easiest and most suggested method is to put them into the /data/ folder (where other mods go).
This will generally be your Mabi install folder, then /data/material/.
If you're using a code patch mod like Abyss/Kanan's, it should work automatically.
Otherwise (less suggested) you can pack the textures. If you really want to do this method, then...
Download Data Packer and put it in your Mabinogi install folder.
After that, run the data packer and click the Find button, wait a minute for it to finish.
When it tells you it's done, click the modify button and tell it yes, then wait for confirmation.
If all went well, you should be playing the game with resized textures now.
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