I noticed alot of people are experiencing
crashes when using 2x jerseys. The main reason this is happening is because they are also using updated courts that have
extremely high resolution textures. The more high resolution patches you have, the more the game is likely to crash.
The only way to stop the crashing and still use the 2x jersey is to
lower the resolution of those court files.
Here's how to do it.
You will need
FSHx for lowering the resolution of the fsh's and either one of
EAGraph,
biggui or
Dolffin Live to open the VIV files if there are any. I recommend Dolffin, but most of you already have all the fsh's in your sgsm directory, so you will only need FSHx
I will use the Atlanta Hawks court made by Lagoa. Just to let you know, I don't have any crashes with the Atlanta court, but I have already fixed all the other ones that are going to be available in SUM v2. I open the
atla.viv file from the
stadia directory in Dolffin Live.
The files we want to pay the most attention to are the crt_vram.fsh and crt.fsh files, with the team abbreviation in front they read as-
atlacrt_vram.fsh
atlacrt.fsh
These files contain the on-court graphics, which have had their resolution increased immensely by court updaters.
We are looking for oversized textures, but how do we spot them? Anything with a resolution of
2048 is oversized. The game can still run with 1024 size textures, but we may need to lower them to 512 because the mipmaps cause extra memory to be used.
Some info about mipmaps.
Mipmaps are scaled down images of the file, and some FSH's have them and some don't. They are used in games when images are visible from far away. One of my gripes about using FSHX to double the resolution of a texture is that it adds an mipmap, and each time it does that it quadruples the size of the file.
For instance,
Say I have a 256x256 texture with no mipmaps and it is ~65 kb when using the DXT3 format.
I 2x it in FSHx and it becomes a 512x512 texture. It's filesize is 4x that of the 256x256 image because both horizontal and vertical resolution have been doubled and 2x2=4. So the 512x512 image is now ~260 kb, and it has one mipmap with a resolution of 256x256 and a size of ~65 kb. The FSH is now ~325 kb. Double it again to 1024x1024 and the size becomes ~1040 kb, but with 2 mipmaps for 512 and 256 resolutions and when we add their file sizes - 1040 + 65 + 260 = ~1365 kb. Double it again and we have a "4x texture", 2048x2048 with a fielsize of ~4160 kb + the 3 mipmaps for 1024, 512, and 256 resolution. That's 4160 + 1365= ~5525 kb. Most court textures are DXT1, which makes them a little bit smaller.
Quite honestly, that shouldn't mean anything. If Live were a true made-for-PC game, it would probably just lower the performance instead of crash it, but every game has thier limits. /rant
Ok, so I looked at the atlacrt_vram.fsh images, and they look ok. I don't see any truly oversized textures. You could half size the owod texture to 128x128 if you needed.
The main one that needs to be half sized is the center court texture, located in the atlacrt.fsh file.
As you can see it's 1024x512 with 5 mipmaps. That means that it contains the following scaled resolutions of that image.
1024x512
512x256
256x128
128x64
64x32
We really don't need any of those except the 1024x512 image or the 512x256 image, but removing the mipmaps is a more advanced process that I may get into at another time so court makers can make their courts high resolution without causing crashes when other high resolution patches are used at the same time.
In Dolffin, we are going to click on the "atlacrt.fsh" to select it, and choose
File->Export Blob from the top menu. Just open the FSH in FSHx if you already have the atlacrt.fsh file in your sgsm directory
Now open it in FSHx, select the tlga image and choose
Texture->Half-Resolution.
It's very important to use the "Save As" command and change the filename becuase FSHx does not correct the size of the file. I am saving it as
1atlacrt.fsh instead of atlacrt.fsh. Notice the difference in filesize, the new file is much lower in size.
Rename the original atlacrt.fsh to something else, or juse delete it. Then rename the 1atlacrt.fsh to atlacrt.fsh and put it in your sgsm directory if it isn't already. Play the game and hope for no crashes. If it still crashes when you pause the game, or after any quarter break, you may need to lower more textures like the wood or the backboard or the oncourt stadium logos, etc, or even get rid of the mipmaps, which is more advanced and like I said I will get into it later.