Embedding items Limit only 150kb

[The_Big_Boo]

first throw (free creativity):
vlkvlrqsiotjhsdgè(-çàé"'çà

With less constraints: (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

And by creating these, I assign to myself these artificial constraints / obstacles / goals.

I think you said it all with this. You feel more creative because of constraints you assign to yourself, not because of contraints someone else imposed to you. Everyone has its own set of constraints he feels more creative with and you can't decide for others that they should feel exactly like you under the exact same conditions.

[TGYoshi]

I think embedded items is not a good solution. Why ? Because of this kind of topic. Because the community will ask to move the limit. In my opinion the best solution was simple : items are only available in title packs. Easier to understand and no discussion about the size

This way need a better coperation between item creators and title packs builbers. It is a longer way but it is more interesting. The only interesting thing with the embedding limit is to develop competences : small size item and game textures. That's good for the future.

I agree with Fix about limitation. It is much more interesting but it is difficult to know where should be the limit. Here with item embedded or for mixmapping or car mixing or gameplay parameters. And more important it is very difficult if the limitation always move.

You might enjoy the way titlepacks work, and I respect that. But I don't . I started creating "real" objects since this was introduced, because people would actually play maps containing the objects. My motivation is people using things, or playing with it. It's so extremely hard to get people to download and install a titlepack. I'm fairly sure this motivates many other builders and modellers to create things now people can easily access and play with them.
I honestly haven't ever bothered to install Raid, although it sounds like a really cool titlepack, I'm just too lazy to find it... I guess I should try it someday .
I found the RPG titlepack because I was involved with people playing RPG or talking about it, not because of the store/some hidden manialink/some hidden website...
The Combo titlepack also lacks players - it's hidden, few know about it. The TM2 titlepack lacks players - it's hidden, few know about it.

Which is why embedded objects are a great: they remove an annoying wall between the servers/maps and the "lazy" player. The size limit is just flat out annoying and honestly I still don't see why it should exist since it's more frustrating then a creativity promoting restriction - you're required to reduce the quality of your creations so they "fit". Game/Title textures are an obvious logical limitation though, and even does promote creative usage of the set of textures .

[adsun]

(no troll here) I'm wondering what the TMX admins think about this subject (they pay for storage I think), or the server hosts ?

Would actually be interesting to hear MrA's opinion.
I think as long as the file size stays below 2MB it should not be too big of a deal.
The biggest of my TM2 Maps I could find (without embedded objects) had 815kB. That is with a bunch of ghosts and all the fancy MT stuff. Compared to that, the current size limit of 150kB seem really small.
It would be no problem to crash the 2MB limit (I think that was the limit on MX aswell) by adding a bunch of ghosts to a map. I think that shows how unjustified a 150kB limit just for objects is.

A good solution would be a general size limit warning once you hit 2MB, since that is (I belive) the dedicated server size limit. Maybe even have a flag in the map file, that marks over 2MB maps as offline only.

What would also really increase the efficiency would be to not embed the icons of the objects in the map file, but just the geometry. I can't remember exact numbers, but TGYoshi tested this and noticed that adding icons to the objects increased the size by a lot.

Also just came up with my personal conspiracy theory behind the size limitation:
What if the limit was implemented to prevent people from adding objects with a high poly count in order to guarantee acceptable performance for people with low-end machines?

[haenry]

Also just came up with my personal conspiracy theory behind the size limitation:
What if the limit was implemented to prevent people from adding objects with a high poly count in order to guarantee acceptable performance for people with low-end machines?

In my opinion the limit is implemented to force people to use titlepacks. "Players are not allowed to have many possibilities to be creative and to create maps, if they do not use titlepacks"
That's what I think is the purpose of the limit. It is NOT my opinion tho.

The limit is irrational. It does not boost creativity because you cannot "play" with the limit as you can do with the block editor because the limit is hidden - you cannot see it. It applies after the process of building and then tells you that the map you created cannot be used anywhere. All for nothing

Filesize and downloading size is really not a problem these days. Even for MX and servers it is no problem at all. Storage is super cheap these days and measured in GB or more recent TB. KB do not play a role in the world of storage any more.

I hope Nadeo removes the limit, which seems to be there for the sake of promoting titlepacks, which is really not a good reason
Else embedded objects are by far the best thing Nadeo has done for a long time

[osaka-san]

I'm with haen in here. The biggest problem is how they don't tell how big on embedded objects your map actually IS, and then they go "bruh this shit's heavy, you can't use this". If it were to have lowpoly objects they can just put a limit on single object size ("Your object can't be bigger than 15kb", for example), or remove trees from the very fabric of TM since it's always been the single biggest lag creator of the game. In fact, if you put a 150kb object chances are some PCs can't handle it either if you spam it a bit. So that's not the point.

The point does seem fishy (aka "Use titlepacks for creativity"), so I'm going to bounce the question back at Nadeo: What is the point of every map being its own titlepack, like it might very well happen if people build their maps with their own blocks but don't want to have a several hundreds of MB in a single titlepack just to play a map? As Haen said, size isn't really a problem anymore - I live on the mountains, where da inturnetz is still thought to be a black box with a red flickering led, and I can play MP online and download a 2-3 MB file fairly quickly. I have the smallest HDD that could come on a laptop of this line and it's 570GB. I can go to the store and buy an external 2TB drive that fits in my pocket for a bit under 100 bucks. It's 2014 goddammit. 150kb won't even fit a screenshot. Let us be great.

Yours sincerely,

Osaka, moderator at MX, FT member, Translator of half of this game to spanish.

[gadoweldosd]

I fully agree, 150kb isn't enough!

Let us be great

[Realspace]

My 0.02USD:

150KB for all objects embedded seems ... odd. Maniaplanet (outside of embedded blocks) has one really major restriction: the 2MB filesize cap , of which I haven't heard much complaining of. The only place I ever heard of it becoming an issue was the District 25 map in Canyon - but it should be noted that D25 was also an hour long with no multilap use. The 2MB filesize cap doesn't have quite as much a use anymore either - every time I get an update for Canyon it's pretty much another 600-800 MB download. So if we take the lowball estimate there, that's the same as downloading 300 maps that are all at the filesize cap of 2MB. Except, there's a problem with this comparison: very few maps get anywhere near the 2MB cap - embedded objects or not. An example would be eyebo's "Fire Away! I Am Titanium", which on my computer lists at being 300KB. If we had a hypothetical extra 150KB from embedded blocks, we get 450KB - that's not even a quarter of the 2MB cap! Maps can be even smaller, less than 200KB or even 100KB. So there is room for more than 150KB's worth of embedded blocks in everyday use cases.

Another thing about the whole "the 150KB limit makes creative use of things" that I don't think has been mentioned: Shortly before the update introducing embedded blocks, mix-mapping was added officially, which does the opposite of the 150KB limit: it removes limitations, not add them like the 150KB limit.

Some people in this thread have said that the 2MB limit doesn't serve much a purpose either. I can see where they are coming from: Even for me, with 10mbps (that's megabits) internet, since the next map gets loaded before the match ends, I'm going to have the map well in advance. Heck, a map could be 5MB, and I would not notice loading times because it's loaded in advance. If you *really* wanted to save downloading amounts, try this: when a new map is loaded online - put it in the cache with car skins, horns, and so on - if the map pops up again, get it from the cache, and not download it again. You do it already with the previously mentioned car skins, horns, texture mods, and so on, why not maps? Seems like a fair compromise.

Anyway, this post has run way into ranting territory (I think it's a citizen of the land of ranting at this point).

[Nerpson]

You can't save all the maps you played in cache. Come on. For somebody who play the game more than 3 hours per day, his cache size would quickly rise up to gigabytes of data. It's impossible.

[TGYoshi]

You can't save all the maps you played in cache. Come on. For somebody who play the game more than 3 hours per day, his cache size would quickly rise up to gigabytes of data. It's impossible.

It's not really valuable either, on average a medium-large sized map is like 600 kB, redownloading that every match isn't really a problem. Maps aren't replayed that often (usually).

I still think the main reason this limit exists is to promote the usage of titlepacks, but I've explained enough times that embedding makes everything much more accessible.
Data connections aren't that bad anymore. And if you have a bad one, you can't download the game or updates easily anyway. It's not like embedded blocks quadruple the filesize, like "embedded" lightmaps do. "Embedded" lightmaps, however, are worth the cost. Just like embedded objects I'd say.

[Cerovan]

Please remember that the 150kb limit isn't necessarily definitive, like others Maniaplanet tools, may be changed later.

Also we have always stated that we wish the main title (of each environment) to be easily recognizable at the first sight, that's also why the customization options for the "vanilla" maps are limited.

Each environment has a theme (Canyon for canyon, Valley for Valley, etc.), it can be strange for a newcomer, to go on a online server, and to arrive on a scifi-themed map instead the Canyon-themed he has bought (or try). Maybe he'll like, maybe not, if yes maybe he would want to create a map like this, load the editor and doesn't find any of the blocks (or the most important ones) he saw earlier in his run. That's an odd experience that may have a newcomer.

While we want to give more customization to the creators, there is also many more factors to take into account: Internet requirements, PC requirements, First User Experience, brand policy, benefits for the creator, benefits for the player, etc.

The job is to find the right balance between all the factors (and it's not easy ^^)