[Gregster2k]

I need to turn off:

- 3D Shockwaves (I preferred the original [V] style of shockwaves)
- Expensive animated glows on certain ships (especially Shivans), without disabling the rest of the AdvEffects

[Droid803]

Well, you could open AdvEffects with a VP editor and delete the stuff you don't want (shockwave.pof, and the animated glowmaps.)

[Gregster2k]

VPMage doesnt make any sense. ._.

[blowfish]

Use Maja

[Jeff Vader]

I wouldn't delete anything from any vp. But rather extract the ones I want to use, place them into the proper folders and move the vp itself somewhere far away from the original folder.

[Stormkeeper]

I wouldn't delete anything from any vp. But rather extract the ones I want to use, place them into the proper folders and move the vp itself somewhere far away from the original folder.

Sound advice. Listen to him. And if you used Turey's Installer, and checked all the options, it comes with VPView which you can use to extract the effects and deal with them accordingly.

[Droid803]

I don't see what's wrong with deleting from the VP in this case, since all one has to do get them back is to download it again, and its only like 100 MB or so.

[Jeff Vader]

The point being that every time you unnecessarily download something, a server sheds a tear. If you persist on deleting something from a vp, at least do it so that you first create a backup of the vp so that you won't need to start redownloading stuff.

[Droid803]

True...true...
I said delete because its the simple way. I've ran into enough people that messed up backing up something, and ended up f*cking it up even more, so I stopped suggesting that.

[Gregster2k]

I am going to go with Lobo's suggestion for now -- easier to do my customizations and track my changes (which is pretty damn important if I want to submit any 3.6.10 Beta bug reports later). But I must delete the VPs after extraction (they take up too much disk space), so either way...

I need a way to quickly preview DDS files in a directory, so that I know which effects I am chopping out. Sometimes looking at the name isn't very helpful...

EDIT: http://files.filefront.com/DDS+Viewer+Plugin/;5255605/fileinfo.html
Works as advertised. Switch to Thumbnail view in Explorer to see.

Stupid question that really belongs in SCP forum: Does SCP load ALL files in a data directory even if they are not recognized by any table, model, etc? I.e. if I keep duplicate "Copy of" DDS files lying around, does that increase memory overhead?

[blowfish]

The files won't be loaded if they aren't used anywhere