Orion Wrote:File size is a non-issue. It might have been when hard drives were 100 MB but that was over 20 years ago.Orion, please just don't use such a simple argumentation!
You are throwing the argumentation why stugs exist back to its beginning,
I feel this is counter-productive, as this discussion has been led long time ago when they got created.
The point is not mainly about filesize on harddisk (although even that still is an issue, think of mobile devices!).
The point is about loading and parsing times.
Let me just throw together a quick, rough thumb calculation to explain the performance gain.
imagine a model containing 4 parts, each of those parts contains a section of 4x8 studs.
without stugs, this means:
1. parse 4 lines in the model, referencing the parts.
2. parse the 4 parts, each contains at least 32 lines of stud references.
3. parse the stud.dat file 1 time.
Sum:
4+4x32 = 132 lines, each having a transformation matrix.
1 time parsing of stud.dat
with stugs, the calculation goes this way:
1. parse the 4 lines in the model, referencing the parts.
2. parse the 4 parts, each contains 2 references to the 4x4 stug
3. parse the 4x4 stug 1 time
4. parse the stug.dat 1 time
4+4*2 =12 lines, each having a transformation matrix
1 time parsing of the 4x4 stug.dat
1 time parsing of stud.dat
THIS is the performance gain.
Loading time of parts and models does matter for big models.
The gain will be even much bigger for models containing more parts
or for parts containing many studs.