Reducing .dae File Size

Hey guys,

I've been working on a map on and off for a while now. I've been making a lot of custom objects for this map using blender and then exporting them as .dae files to use in the mod. Some of these objects are complex and it's making the file size of my map very large. I've tried cutting down the number of vertices in these objects but it's still pretty bad. Is there any way to compress these files or export them in another format that takes up less space for use in BeamNG drive?

 

Biggest one is 45MB at 145K verts and there are a few more at that kind of size. Smoothing the shapes of complex objects to make nice looking curves makes that number really high. When I export the file as a .stl it's 'only' 13MB but BeamNG drive doesn't seem to recognise that file format...

 

I will second this even though I'm not part of staff. Been working with ZIP format since the MS-DOS days pre-Windows 95 here... since the days of Doom modding in 94 or so!
Yes, ZIP will reduce file-sizes! It's a wonderful thing, and years ago (in the 90s) you didn't upload anything larger than a 20kb midi file (does anyone remember those?) that wasn't in a ZIP file.
So yes, entirely, ZIP works by reducing the size of the file:
through DEFLATION (removing open space - DAE's are plain-text XML, they have LOTS of this, especially Maya DAE's!)...
and through COMPRESSION (making repeating versions of the file - like geometry for the collision mesh and one of your LOD's - which are often the same model roughly - referenced by a single line of code that would just be representing all of it, which all gets put back to normal when it's expanded/unzipped ).
Things like MP3's, OGG's or compressed image/movie files can't / won't really be helped by ZIP compression as they already have compression built-in, so they in-fact may get 0.01% larger by the whole ordeal - but this is offset by the amount it helps everything else (it helps DAE's, the majority of your problem, IMMENSELY).

So in that sense, the download isn't a *LOT* bigger then it would have been, and you shouldn't worry too much until you go over 488.x MB in ZIPPED file size limit for the server here (don't forget to choose ULTRA compression).
The forum didn't accept 7zip files last time I checked, and most people won't know what to do with those, or how to manually extract a map into beamng.drive\levels as it is where you edit it, so it's best to use ZIP format for releases.
Like I do you can still feel quite free to use 7zip for your local backups though. It's good to back-up your files, so please do it often! I have used mine many times - too many to remember all the times - over my 2500+ hours just on Roane County alone.

--Cheers!

 

Thanks guys- this is very good information to know. I was not aware of the effects of zipping the files.