Release optimization - textures

[i3urn]

Godot Version

4.2

Question

I have a directory with 16k individual textures

$ ls *.png | wc -l
16274

And Godot starts importing all these textures.

Now, in my game I only use 5 textures.

When I create a release build, will my game ship with 16k textures or only the ones I am using?

[Octopus]

So you don’t need those at all in the release build? When you export your project, you can select what resources are exported. In the export dialog, select Resources tab and set “Export selected resources (and dependencies)” as your Export Mode.

[i3urn]

Yes, I wont be needing all those textures, but they are nonetheless part of the project, so I can play around with them inside the editor, and see what texture I like most.

From your answer I understand that there is no option for Godot to auto-detect what I’m actually using (e.g: what materials are applied to 3D scenes) and I need to manually provide what exactly I want exported. That’s a bit of a bummer, but understandable as Godot can’t know which materials I’m using, as material switching could happen at runtime.

Thankfully, the resources dialog seems to include user-input for a comma separated list of things to ignore. So I can write my own script that inspects .tscn files and generates such a string list.