Steffen Wrote:The stugs allow a massive compression of both filesize on harddisk and internal memory storage of a part.
For example, a big baseplate with 32x32 studs will shrink dramatically.
The effect is easily achieved because the usage of stugs shrinks the references to studs
logarithmically.
Steffan,
I appreciate the insight into the thought process very much.
You should know there is effectively zero internal memory savings by doing this. The memory hit comes from referencing geometry in a part. How you juggle around the way the geometry is referenced at the file level has no bearing on the end result.
While group files like this do indeed save a few lines of text parsing, they offer no savings in geometry processing, which is a hefty bit of "parsing" time.
As for disk savings, this is also not what one might expect. Most LDraw files are tiny. Hard drives, or filesystems or something, have a minimum sector size each individual file must carve out. For example, on my system, no file is smaller than 4 KB, even if it only has 1 byte of content. Only the hugest stud fields are going to come close to using up the whole 4 KB. Any effort to shrink files that are already smaller than 4 KB will yield no disk savings whatsoever.
Allen