Asset Creation Part 4 – File Management

Overview

Continuation of the Asset Creation guide series. This is part 4 which will cover file management, efficient practices, batch importing and hosting solutions.

Introduction

This part of the guide series will be focusing on managing your files, speeding up your work and using the better tools and practices. I will be covering how to work with local files, batch importing and hosting/uploading among other important game component topics.

Local Files

Working with local files before publishing can be greatly beneficial to your workflow, especially if your assets need to go through several revisions and changes. Files are grabbed and loaded in to memory when you load up the mod.

This is useful in building large sets of assetbundles, changing decks or sets of tokens, as reloading the save is far less clicks than re-importing hundreds of individual assets.

Files in the default mod caching directory- “My GamesTabletop SimulatorMods” can be loaded with just their filename rather than having to point to the full path. In the above example I’ve made a sub directory in the “AssetBundles” folder called “blocks” that I’ve put my two assetbundles in.

Since these files are now loaded locally, if we change the asset and overwrite it we can “refresh” the changes you’ve made by saving your progress, navigating back to the main menu then loading up the mod again. This requires the “Mod Caching” option to be enabled.

I believe the exiting to the main menu step is necessary due to the way the game handles assets loaded in to memory, keeping them cached until you exit.

Name and Folder Structure

Forward thinking is the key to efficiency, doing important things ahead of time can save you some serious headaches later down the road.

For both batch importing and your own sanity, using a sensible naming structure that you can also work with programmatically is highly beneficial. Make use of local files and subfolders, categorize files by types and number large sets of repetivie assets.

While you can copy and paste file names in to a list for your batch importer, it’s far quicker to have numbered your assets (myTile1, myTile2 e.t.c) ahead of time and let the LUA script handle incrementing the number for you.

In windows, without using any scripts you can select a group of files and rename them to automatically assign a number after the name.

Batch Importing [LUA]

Batch importing is when you programatically load in large sets of components in order to save you the time and hassle of doing it manually.

In TTS we will be doing this using LUA, and the following section expects you to have a modest grasp on the fundamentals of scripting. That said though if you really are clueless and unwilling to learn you can also just copy and paste the script.

In my example I will be using Assetbundles (which are the main focus of these guides). You can modify the script to work with the .obj importer or generated assets.

First and foremost we make sure to have named our assets sensibly by adding a number after each tile. The other assetbundle is our secondary bundle containing only the materials.
The assets are in our local TTS directory so we don’t need to point to the full path.

We will be using a for loop with spawnObject() and setCustomObject() to import this set.

function spawnObjects() local int = 0 for i=1, 4 do — do the following 4 times int = int + 1 — increment our int for each object spawned local obj = spawnObject({ type=”Custom_AssetBundle”, — add some height in between each spawn to prevent collision chaos position={0+ int * 2, 1 + int, 0}, scale={0.5,0.5,0.5} — adjust the scale if needed }) obj.setCustomObject({ type=0, — what type to import as (generic, board e.t.c) — add our incrementing int to the path for each tile assetbundle=”batch_demo/example_tile_” .. int .. “.unity3d”, — secondary assetbundle field for our material bundle assetbundle_secondary=”batch_demo/example_tile_materials.unity3d” }) end end

And when we run this function, our set of tokens import without us having to do it manually.
For modifying the code to work with other types of assets, refer to the TTS LUA docs:

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This code is also available as a tool here:
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Uploading and Compression

For other users to be able to access your files they need to be uploaded and hosted somewhere.
But not all filehosts are created equal and most are not made with the intent to upload high quality textures as much as they are for sharing facebook memes. Compression and optimization is important too, we only need to use up as much bandwidth as we need.

Image Compression

Compression doesn’t have to be rocket science, tools like Photoshop give you an easy to use slider with a live preview of the result and filesize. There is no strict right or wrong in which settings to use, a middleground between retaining quality and reducing filesize is typically what you’re looking for. An image in the tens of megabytes is probably a fair bit too large, but we don’t want to compress it to the point where the image looks substantially worse.

Hosting Services to Avoid

When it comes to hosting solutions, the main bad apples that I am aware of are Imgur, Pastebin and Photobucket. These sites were viable compromises before the addition of the Steam Cloud as they are free and sometimes “modestly reliable” but should be avoided if you care about the quality of your images or integrity of your data. On top of absolutely destroying your images with bad compression there are no benefits to using them when the option of the Steam Cloud is available to you.

Comparison of a card sheet imported to Imgur (left) to one compressed to roughly the same filesize and uploaded to the Steam Cloud (right).

Steam Cloud

A good option that is open and available to everyone with a copy of the game is the built in Steam Cloud. You can access it in game from the “Upload” button.

An easy way to automagically upload your mod files is to use the “Upload all Loaded Files” function which does exactly what it’s labelled as.

Conclusion

Modding doesn’t have to be a tedium, doing things properly the first time around will prevent many problems and lackluster results later on.

You can find the previous guides here:
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