[robotortoise]

If I precache something ( a model, material, sound, entity....) on my server, does that mean it also has to load into RAM on the client? Is that why my server takes so long to connect to?

Or is it just because TF2 is old and not related to all my custom content?

[ddhoward]

Originally Posted by robotortoise does that mean it also has to load into RAM on the client?

This is the sole purpose of the Precache functions. (I'm fairly certain.)

If, every time a player equipped a different model, every other player had to load the model from their HDDs right then and there... everyone would be lagging all the time.

[robotortoise]

Originally Posted by ddhoward This is the sole purpose of the Precache functions. (I'm fairly certain.) If, every time a player equipped a different model, every other player had to load the model from their HDDs right then and there... everyone would be lagging all the time.

Oh jeez! I better be more careful with what I precache then!

Thanks!

[friagram]

It doesn't persist all of that data in memory... If I precache 400 extra models (which I do on one of my mods) it does not make the client load all of those models, materials, etc into memory...) all of that uncompressed dxt textures would be 500mb- 1gb+... That does not appear to happen. Lots of older video cards do not even have that much texture memory. I don't know but I assume it gets flushed, and new stuff gets loaded in. Probably there is some way to set it, or mabye it is hard coded.

[friagram]

Originally Posted by ddhoward This is the sole purpose of the Precache functions. (I'm fairly certain.) If, every time a player equipped a different model, every other player had to load the model from their HDDs right then and there... everyone would be lagging all the time.

Also, as of the last few patches, this is exactly what is happening.
I think valve took the smarter approach, where clients don't just load it on demand though, it's put into a queue and loaded as low priority stuff so that it does not stall the client (well, it still does but not badly). Go ahead and swap the classes of everyone on a 32 player server st once, you'll lag hard as your client loads all of those wearables, weapons, etc.