MA terrain res file size

[Greebo]

Looking at the default MA terrains I see their res files are around 2000-4700kb in size. The MA terrain I'm working on is under 3000kb if I have no transparent water effects in it, but can easily go over 9000kb if I add a gaussian blurred coastline to the waterd file.

Is res file size why none of the current MA terrains appear to use water transparency? Is there a rule or guideline about how big an MA terrain res file can be?

[MachNix]

As a dial-up user, I want small downloads.  But I also want good looking terrains to play on.  I am still experimenting with one of my MA terrains but it went from 3,841kb to over 19,000kb when adding the ocean details.  I hope to get the res file size down to about 8,000kb by restricting the ocean details to "important" areas of the terrain.

  Remember to remove the waterc.bmp and waterd.bmp files from the texsrc folder before building the terrain.

I too would like to hear if HTC has any guidelines on the maximum size of the MA terrain res files.

[Easyscor]

When you make your waterc.bmp, except for the actual transition areas, use as much white as possible. All the other colors, unneeded black in this case, add to the .res file size.

I should really reconfirm this, but I can't delete the post now.

[Greebo]

I did a test building my terrain with an all grey waterc file, then an all white one. The res files ended up the same size in both cases. In theory an all one colour waterc file should compress to the smallest size possible in a res file. I find zipping the bmp and seeing how big the zip file ends up gives a pretty good estimate of how much that file will expand the res file size.