How to manage space in VAM going forward?

[VAMIC]

There have been a lot of discussions about managing space in VAM. A lot of these discussions have been focused on managing or offsetting the burden cached files have on users, but as we know, they can easily be cleared to free up space. The number of VAR files has been shown to impact performance in VAM, slowing things down and this too has been exhaustively commented on and may be solved in 2.0 whenever it drops.

But lately, the file size of the average package is undergoing a serious inflation of size. In part it's because textures on person and object atoms have gotten SO much better. Creators are really pushing the bounds of realism with some of their texturing and honestly I wouldn't have it any other way. If 2.0 promises even more modern DAZ versions, we can only expect that there will be more inflations in file size as G8 and G9 characters have even more detail. The increases to quality will be incredibly alluring and probably improve all sorts of experiences in VAM, but how do we balance the limitations of Hard Drive space? External drives tend to slow things down and some approaches like server uploading haven't really taken off. I'm interested to know what people are currently doing to manage space? Some solutions have focused on moving things on and off of your PC when you're using them, but often when I go into VAM to make things, I don't quite know what I'm going to do until I get there. Any thoughts on how to deal with this issue going forward? Is there any kind of compression VAM could do in 2.0 to decrease file size that wouldn't decrease quality? Interested to know your plans for this @meshedvr @VaMDeV

 

[atani]

If disk space taken by VaM resources is a problem, then the most important action one has to take is to keep less. Doesn't matter what else you do, if you just keep on adding and not removing anything, disk usage will always increase.
Honestly, I don't consider disk space to be that much of an issue considering that VaM is a performance beast and so is recommended to use a desktop PC, where adding a new internal disk is pretty easy and doable. For those on laptops, well, you're already compromising on some things, that's just one more, and more reason to remove what you don't want.

My VaM (playing) folder is 109 GB. I extensively edit VARs, but even if I had not touched any textures at most it would be 200 GB. The important part is that I keep only what I want, the rest can go to the bin or some other place in storage.

 

[VAMIC]

If disk space taken by VaM resources is a problem, then the most important action one has to take is to keep less. Doesn't matter what else you do, if you just keep on adding and not removing anything, disk usage will always increase.
Honestly, I don't consider disk space to be that much of an issue considering that VaM is a performance beast and so is recommended to use a desktop PC, where adding a new internal disk is pretty easy and doable. For those on laptops, well, you're already compromising on some things, that's just one more, and more reason to remove what you don't want.

My VaM (playing) folder is 109 GB. I extensively edit VARs, but even if I had not touched any textures at most it would be 200 GB. The important part is that I keep only what I want, the rest can go to the bin or some other place in storage.

While it's true that proactively managing files is a way to deal with reaching storage limits, the file structure of VAM and the dependency system mean it's hard to safely know what to get rid of. It's very difficult to remember each scene's dependency list and cumbersome to redownload scenes that sometime disappear from the Hub. I know a comment made before by the Admin team was that there was going to be a reverse dependency list feature of some sort added to either the website or the hub so we can better know what to keep and discard, but I'm not sure when we'll see that.

But what I'm talking about in this case isn't reaching storage limits or even file management for performance, but rather the expected inflation of Scenes and Appearances as well as some assets due to new and improved textures. Right now one can have thousands of scenes in their library, but in a future with better textures and more involved scenes like some of the amazing things we're seeing right now from creator collaborations, the average size of a VAR could balloon up to 1 GB when you count all of the dependencies and the file itself. What I'm wondering is whether there might be any sort of compression plans for this or the next version of VAM and I'm also curious whether some users are more or less likely to download large file size scenes, looks, clothing or assets. I also wonder whether creators are thinking about how they can balance file size with quality. Some, like @s p l i n e VR or @DragonPhantom give us incredible detail that's painstakingly crafted and it comes with a large file size, but the quality makes it worth it. I'm interested in how creators and users are navigating dealing with PC real estate. Also, I don't really know enough about what makes files bigger or smaller when dealing with something like say particles. @Farger can you shed any light on that?

 

[Farger]

Most particle effects that use generic billboard texture render in Unity are rather small in size. I'm working new effects now, most are between 100 and 200kb each. It is 3d mesh that can really ramp up the filesize; for example, I used high resolution textures in the lucky asteroids asset, and rendered the asteroids as mesh particles. The file sizes are huge, so I had to limit the number of variations I could post. I have about 57gb in my AddonPackages folder. If I try out a VAR that I prob wont open again, I delete it right away to keep that folder as lean as possible.