More Awesome Than You!

If I delete the textures but not the meshes they use, do the meshes still get loaded? I'm trying to clean out my downloads folder and I'm wondering how much effort I should put in to finding unused meshes and deleting them. Btw, is there a way in SimPE to find unused meshes? I think I read something about this but I've never been able to figure out how to do it. Thanks :)

As far as I know, the meshes do get left behind, even after you delete all the textures for them. This even happens with clothing, hair, etc when you delete them from Bodyshop or CAS - even when you delete the ones labelled as meshes, only the textures are actually deleted. I don't know how to find orphaned meshes in SimPE. Somebody more awesome than me will have to explain it (and I'll learn something too).

I think the question wasn't do the mesh files remain in the folder, but does the game bother to load them into memory when there's no texture, thus causing slowdowns

I wondered this too.  I also heard there was supposed to be a way to find orphaned meshes in SimPE, but I think they said it wasn't working properly.  :(

From all that I have learned from my research (which is not awesome either), everything that is in your downloads folder (generally everywhere in the "The Sims 2" directory) is at least partially loaded in memory when starting up. I believe the memory usage is greatly lessened when there are no textures and catalog entries associated with that mesh.

It certainly requires additional time to read through all these mesh files at startup.
But I don't know of an automated way (or even an easy manual way) to located the unused ones. Perhaps you could make a lot and put all your keeper items on it and to then move these files out of the directory in small groups and see if you get flashing blue out of them.

If you want to even figure out which files are only meshes without a hint in the filename, you would have to look at them in SimPE and find the ones that have a GMDC in them with no TXTR.

Clean Installer and SimPE can both tell you which files are meshes and which are just textures/recolors. Sadly that's as far as it goes.

A very timely topic, I just am doing this today.  :D Yes, they take up memory.

This is the orignal topic about it a couple months back, that I searched for today, to refresh my memory.  :) http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,5836.50.html

Basically, the base-recolor mesh that's built into SimPe works on non-bodyshop things, and Theo wrote a plugin that works on the rest- and his site had an update for .60 (which also is working fine in .60.2...)  The trick is, you have to have the mesh and recolor in the same folder, without subfolders, to get it to work right. To get rid of them, sort by "found base" for instance, unclick enable on all the red highlighted "no's" and then go into your downloads folder and delete all the .packagedisabled files.

Thanks everyone. I will give Theo's plugin a try.

Another way of seeing orphaned meshes is in game. After I deleted a bunch of hairstyles - because I can only really see them properly in game - I ended up with a lot of the placeholder hairstyle - the straight shoulder length one with the part in the middle - there were zillions in my custom hair area.

The same for clothing, if I have a mesh but no recolours, it is shown as the shirt and 3/4 pants - white and (red or orange or pink)? outfit. I assume when I delete those I'm actually getting rid of the mesh as the placeholder outfits don't come back.

Don't know what the male or other age defaults are, I tend to have more cc crap for female adults than any other group.

Yep. Ye olde brainfog strikes again. ::) I really have quite good reading comprehension skills when I'm not tired, I swear.

ETA: The male adult placeholder for Bodyshop/CAS is a grey suit with a blue tie. I think the tie is either solid blue or blue with stripes, but I don't remember for sure. I just look for whatever Maxis outfit or hair keeps repeating itself within my CC and delete each instance of it that I find.

With objects, that doesn't work at all. If you delete in-game, it will delete the mesh,but not all the recolors, which also slow you down.

It also is painfully slow to delete things in-game. Once you've cached in SimPe, it takes a lot less time.  :) (And yesterday, I started it loading and then ran errands. When I came home, I could clean it out LOL)

With objects in game, the trick is to delete all the recolours first and then the mesh - delete the recolours with the design tool menu and the mesh in the catalogue

That's what I do. It's much less time-consuming than loading SimPE or Paladin's Categorizer.

A controlled experiment has not been performed on this, but the theory would seem to be yes, as you can't delete the file while the game is running even if the game does not use it.