How to minimize bloat?

[neurodr0me]

For Gaia I am only interested in the terrain generation tools and the spawners. I am not interested in Flora, Water System, Photo Mode, demo assets, gaia runtime, cars, controllers, weather system, lighting system, terrain stitching, terrain loading, floating point fix, HDRPTOD, etc.

I literally just want to make terrain and populate it (and to be clear, Gaia is AMAZING at these tasks! I love using it for these goals).

Currently trying to see what I can get away with deleting to get my project size down, but I'm finding a lot of this stuff is heavily intertwined throughout the code.

What's the best way to go about installing Gaia with as little of the bloat as humanly possible?

[neurodr0me]

All the Spawner functionality is reproduced in GeNa Pro as well, right? I'm contemplating potentially running Gaia in a secondary project that I use to generate the terrains, then just move those over to the primary project which does not have Gaia installed, then I can just move the terrain data back and forth as needed, and use spawners from GeNa to do procedural texturing and spawning?

[Bryan]

We actually have something for this in Gaia Pro 2023. 
The new system will eliminate bloat down a lot. 

We do have a post regarding Gaia Pro 2021 and how to reduce the file size in our Library. 
https://canopy.procedural-worlds.com/library/tools/gaia-pro-2021/written-articles/30_installation__getting_started/reducing-the-installation-file-size-of-gaia-pro-2021-r145/

[neurodr0me]

That is exciting news! Looking forward to more info about 2023. Some kind of "lightweight" version, or just making the package more modular (i.e. I can just uncheck Flora and Weather System and so on when importing and the asset won't freak out) would be a dream!

The dual-project solution is... pretty effective, actually, except it looks like GeNa spawners are different from Gaia spawners so I can't reproduce that behavior in the primary project, so I'd have to make use of Gaia spawners prior to the transfer to the primary project 🤔

[Bryan]

Yeah, we are looking to get it released soon 

 

[neurodr0me]

1 hour ago, Bryan said:

We actually have something for this in Gaia Pro 2023. 
The new system will eliminate bloat down a lot. 

We do have a post regarding Gaia Pro 2021 and how to reduce the file size in our Library. 
https://canopy.procedural-worlds.com/library/tools/gaia-pro-2021/written-articles/30_installation__getting_started/reducing-the-installation-file-size-of-gaia-pro-2021-r145/

 

I took a peek at this link and it is largely concerned with assets, but my primary concern is code systems running that I am not using. With stuff like Flora and Weather System, since I cannot simply delete/exclude them, is it possible to turn these off, and if so do they represent any overhead while disabled? Either in build or in editor?

[neurodr0me]

I was just checking this page, and while I have a better understanding of how Flora works, it does not explain at all *why* I should use it. There are no mentions of performance (better or worse?) and no comparisons to the default features of the engine, so it's not clear what it's doing differently or better, nor what sort of change it represents (i.e. better quality, lower performance or vice versa).

 

[Bryan]

Flora was meant to have grass for HDRP users. 

It does improve editor performance and runtime performance because the grass uses instances indirect. 
Which means the grass will only show in runtime.