Dev Notes: Reduce Texture Files - How It's Done

tldr: it's mainly for "special purposes", it's server-based, it's fast & easy, it can reduce your .ggpk to ~13 Gb.

As you know, we had some problems regarding Texture Resizing:

1. It took too much time (10+ hours on low-end PCs. It was about 15 hours on my old Athlon PC @ PoE v3.10)

2. We can't just resize all texture files. We need specific rules for .dds and they can be changed with any patch.

3. It could be unsafe to do resize job for some patches. Client could crash on start if .dds rules were incorrect.

4. "x4-x8 resize" was useless for humans and isn't enough for "special purposes". We need to reduce textures as much as we can - that's the main goal.

I think I've solved these problems.

I'm going to do most time-consuming operations on my PC. You can connect to my server, get results (~3 MB avg) and import reduced textures to your client after other/"Casual" modifications. It takes few mouse clicks and ~7 minutes on my Ryzen to edit 70k+ textures using new poeNullEffects functions.

Right now we can use your e-mail addresses to identify you on my server (I can see your e-mails here on Patreon). I'll see how it goes, I guess we'll change the ID method later. Let me know if you want to use another specific ID text instead of your e-mail. Anyway, don't worry, my server doesn't receive, doesn't save and doesn't even know your e-mail. I'm using salted hash instead of plain text. So your PC can send just some random symbols that can not be reversed to any useful info. Server doesn't send any executable code. After reducing, the app starts defragmentation job. It should reduce your Content.ggpk file to 13+ Gb depending on selected options.

I'm planning to update server databases on the 1st/2nd/3rd day of each month, alongside with new pNE releases. So you should keep your subscription to get access to the server. 

Preparing it (setting SSL up / etc) to release next week.