Last night, gelydh was telling me about something odd she noticed with some t-shirts she'd downloaded from another creator. They were really cute, and she was really looking forward to using them, only... they didn't show up quite how she was expecting.

She uses my default replacement shirts, which have a slightly better shaped mesh and different textures, along with a change bumpmap to allow for more variation in styles. The shirts she downloaded were showing up with what appeared to be the original EAxis mesh and textures, which was momentarily confusing. The creator had used the TSR Workshop to create these shirts, so I decided to do a bit of poking around in the file to see what I could find out.

Turns out TSRW likes to include a whole buttload of uneccessary bits and pieces in the files, bloating them, and subsequently bloating your downloads folder.




First up, file size. This is before compressorizing either file, but even after, the TSRW-created file weighed in at 293K, which is almost 13 times the size of the compressorized CTU-created file (23K compressed).

Why such a huge difference? A quick peek at the inards of the files explains:



This is what the inside of the file I made with CTU looks like: three simple parts.



Compare that to the inside of the file made with TSRW. The GEOMs are the repeated meshes, and everything aside from the IMG and CASP are parts relating back to those meshes. Remember, this was nothing more than a simple graphic added to a basegame t-shirt; everyone has this mesh in their game already. There's no reason to include it in the file.


I'm sure the TSRW is great for some things -- people seem to be able to make nice enough objects with it, I suppose -- but I'm not sure it's such a good idea to make simple clothing recolors with it. How many multitudes of the same mesh do you want to have floating around your downloads folder? The CTU isn't perfect, but for something simple like a graphic shirt I believe it's the better program of the two to use.

While I'm biased against TSR for unrelated reasons, my purpose for posting this information is simply to keep you, the downloader and creator, informed.