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Reduce your Ortho tile space usage by 75%

X-Plane

In the past weeks I have generated the complete ortho scenery for Germany, using zoom level 16 for all areas, and zoom level 18 for airports with a 4km radius. For this, I used Ortho4XP (Link). It generates textures with a size of 4096x4096, regardless of zoom level. As you can imagine, this can grow quite big pretty quick. In my case the entirety of Germany used up about 460GB, which is still noticable, even if you have 4TB of space on your server.

Luckily, I found a way to reduce the required hard drive space by about 75%. The advantage is two-fold: as mentioned, one advantage is less requirement for space, and second, smaller file size also means less loading time and, by extension, less VRAM needed on the GPU.

To let you know up-front: yes. It is less graphical fidelity, technically speaking. But! I have not noticed that in the simulator. Neither on the ground or in the air.

So. What do we need? One tool: the Skyrim Texture Optimizer (Ordenador) (Link). Download and extract it to a location of your choice.

Run the program.

On the top, choose the folder where the textures are. This is usually a folder called "textures" within the folder of the specific ortho tile.

Next, you need to enable this important option:

It tells the software to reduce the image by 50% - to 2048x2048 if the image is bigger than 1024 - which is the case. Choose 1024 - NOT 2048.

Next, click "Start". Two questions will come up in succession. Answer as follows:

- Resize images? YES
- Create backup? NO

We want to reduce file size and acquire more storage space, hence the no to the backup question.

Let it run. Depending on your machine this could very well take some minutes. Once it is finished, it will tell you that it is done, and it will tell you how much space has been saved:

Repeat this for every tile you want! For me, I ran this on all tiles that make up Germany, with a fantastic result. All tiles now need about 115GB - which is about 74% less than before.

Enjoy!