Been thinking about this a lot lately and wanted to get some real opinions from people running servers.
Everyone agrees that custom clothing is one of the coolest parts of RP — it’s how players actually build identity.
But the second you open the door to more clothing (especially player-created stuff)…
you start running into a different problem:
your server size starts creeping up fast.
Here’s a quick example I tested:
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1024x1024 (DXT1) → ~270 KB
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2048x2048 (DXT1) → ~800 KB
(see image attached)
At a glance, the 2K version feels like it should be way better…
but in-game, the difference honestly isn’t that crazy.
Meanwhile the file size is basically 3x bigger.
Where this gets sketchy
It’s not about one hoodie.
It’s when you start thinking:
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100 clothing items
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300 clothing items
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now imagine letting players create their own…
That’s when it turns into:
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longer downloads
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slower joins
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people getting annoyed before they even load in
So I’m curious…
How are you guys handling this right now?
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Are you capping texture resolution?
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Letting players submit custom clothing at all?
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Compressing everything to DXT1?
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Just manually controlling all assets still?
My honest take
I think player-created clothing is inevitable for RP servers.
But if there’s no standard around:
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resolution
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compression
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file size
…it’s going to turn into a mess real quick.
We’ve been messing around with a workflow where everything gets auto-compressed / capped before it ever touches the server, which seems like the only way this scales…
but I’m more interested in how other people are thinking about it right now.
Curious what you all think —
especially anyone who’s already dealing with a large clothing library.