-= Gametoast.com =-

What factors contribute to the time of a munge? I've noticed that sometimes my munges are fast and sometimes are slow, not because I've added a bunch of things. Sometimes it's just one lua tweak and it takes five minutes. I know that what programs you have open affect it, but what else?

Complex mshs take a long time, especially if the munger has to generate collision.
and if you have a lot of large files as outputs, changing a small thing will still take a long time just because it has to copy a large file.

If your mod tools is on an external hard drive that happens to be a high-speed USB device, and if you plug it into a normal speed USB port, then your munge time will be longer than usual.

Not to mention that your hardware also contributes to how long it takes to do something. My munges have been considerably faster on my new computer, as opposed to my old netbook. Used to take about 5 minutes to do a common munge, now it's about 90 seconds.

To add on to what Kinetos said, it's mainly building the collision geometry on complex unit models that takes awhile. Which is why you should always have a .msh.option for the unit model(s) with the line -nocollision in it.

As Kinetos said, larger the file the longer the munge. Same goes for textures of course. For me it takes about 3/4 of a second to munge a 512x512 texture, a full second if it's got an alpha channel (which a great deal of my textures do). It takes a good amount of time to munge my Saturn texture, which is 2048x2048, and has an alpha channel.

Specifically, I was referring to my sides' .lvl files, which are pretty heavy, so any munge I do takes a long time simply copying compiled side files from the project to addon, but yeah, large single files will also make the munge take longer.

Another one is, if a changed file is a common ClassParent, and it causes an update to every single unit, that can make a 1 character adjustment take quite a while to munge.

kinetosimpetus wrote:Specifically, I was referring to my sides' .lvl files, which are pretty heavy, so any munge I do takes a long time simply copying compiled side files from the project to addon, but yeah, large single files will also make the munge take longer.

Ah yes, I totally forgot about that. I stopped using VisualMunge for anything but creating new project folders a year ago. So I copy the sides over manually, which takes a second or two.

AQT wrote:If your mod tools is on an external hard drive that happens to be a high-speed USB device, and if you plug it into a normal speed USB port, then your munge time will be longer than usual.

Dang, it's on an external hard drive.

The device on which the mod tools are located isn't what matters; what matters is the port which that device is plugged into. Also, external hard drives typically have pretty fast read and write speeds, so...

Having the following usually helps with using a high-speed device with a normal speed USB port: Just plug the main one in, and after the hard drive is accessible, plug the second one in. Then wait a few seconds or so, and safely remove your drive, but only unplug the main one. Finally, plug the main one back in again. This usually works for me. Or if you don't have such a USB cable, just plug and unplug your hard drive until that "your device will run much faster if plugged into a hi-speed USB 2.0 port" message goes away. Usually if the wait time between plugging and unplugging is long, and if you are actively accessing the drive, then the message will go away the next time you plug it in again. So I would use this wait time to do modding related stuff that don't involve using VisualMunge, the localization tool, and even ZE.