Wait are you saying they use a unique mesh for each texture variation on suits/weapons/vehicles?

If so I retract my 'no bad programming' comment.

Oh my god it all makes sense now. You ever seem to get an fps drop at the most inappropriate time? Like just as an enemy is coming into weapon range? I'm sure we've all experienced it. What if that was because the enemy was wearing one of the mesh/texture combinations that weren't loaded into memory during the loading screen? Because lets face it, there's no way you could have all the combinations pre-loaded. If this is correct, and I hope to god it isn't, it has some pretty serious implication. Again I have to stress if this is correct, because this is going to get kinda nasty.

- CCP more than likely know about the performance impact of loading a mesh/texture combo in during gameplay.
- With that knowledge they've repeatedly and consistently added even more mesh/texture combinations into the game.
- The way that these new items are obtained kinda puts CCPs commitment to the game into perspective.

One more time, if this is correct, I'd just like to say that I doubt these decisions are coming from Rattati.

Yep which is why I said I doubt it's Rattati's fault, he's trying to fix it.

I'd very much like to see the appropriate archive. I tried searching for SKIN and filtering by Dev but there was a lot of noise in the results.

Everything outside of those ranges gives a very basic rendering and is only fully loaded once render range is reached.

This is exactly what I'm talking about, it's called Network Relevancy in UE. Outside of a certain distance your client doesn't care what the enemy looks like so it doesn't have anything special to render. The reason I think it's a particular problem in Dust is that the client not only has to go to the RAM to see what it needs to render, it first has to ask the hard drive to put what it needs to render in the RAM first.

At a guess I'd say that once a new character model enters the RAM it stays there. It'd be easy to flag map data for removal from RAM but not so much anything that enters during gameplay.

Since you said please :)

So, I am jumping the gun a little, it's theoretically working but the idea is to create skin modules, that dynamically alter the skins, much like damage modifiers, treating colors like actual attributes. Currently, the dropsuits just reference a material instance that tells it what it should look like.

That means every dropsuit is unique, not a copy of a parent, which means when 32 dropsuits are fighting, there may be 32 unique dropsuits on the field, taking up memory.

The idea is to replace all colored variants with skin modules that look the same. That will allow us to "remove" dropsuit types from player inventories, and refund with modules and normal bpo's of the same type. No loss of utility or worth.

Thereby improving memory, decreasing clutter in dropsuit fittings, and allowing players to use the skin module on adv and proto suits as well.

I am just so excited about this, that I had to share with others than CPM. No promises though!