Mod Impact On Performance, ESPs, ESMs, and pluginless?

[iwestfall7062]

I'm setting up OpenMW on my Android, trying to get a perfect balance between performance and the mods I want to use. I'm not super familiar with ESPs, ESMs, and pluginless mods, but I'm wondering what the impacts on performance are.

I believe ESPs and ESMs are essentially the same?

I'm making a completely blind guess and going to say the ESP and ESM mods impact performance more than pluginless? Unless the pluginless mod does something like add high polygon models, or higher resolution textures?

I enjoy how OpenMW has the ability to keep your mods in a separate folder in the event you want to remove or change something, but I'm wondering if it impacts performance to have multiple mods that may overlap? For example, if I'm using multiple armor replacers, is it hitting performance for OpenMW to load the first imperial armor texture, then it gets to the second mod and goes, oh nvm I gotta load this imperial armor texture instead, then it hits the 3rd and final mod and loads yet another imperial armor texture? (Instead of for example, dropping everything in the Morrowind folder and having things overwrite, so OpenMW only has one file to look at for a given asset?

Edit: Same thing with loading a bunch of different folders in openmw.cfg, is it hitting performance harder than just merging everything into the Morrowind folder, or is it negligible?

[lambda]

I am not conversant with the internals, but my understanding is that that is not how OpenMW loads assets (textures. meshes, etc.). Rather, it scans the whole dir tree in the search order and caches the path of the asset to be loaded, and then when required it loads it. So you pay the cost upfront, when loading the mods at game start, but then loading is just your usual disk access.

As for the relative performance costs of modding and asset loading, it depends. One nagging feature of Morrowind's scripting system (which will only be "fixed" post-1.0) is that scripts are run continuously every frame, even if in most cases all you want is an event-listener logic of the type "if X happens then do Y". Obviously running a script in every frame, or several scripts depending on the mods you have, adds overhead. Once again, take what I say with a grain of salt, as I am not conversant with the internals of the engine.

[iwestfall7062]

Okay, that makes perfect sense on the loading bit, I got you.

And for the scripts, I had read something along those lines when searching for mods. Scripts always running in the background and such.

Thanks for your thoughts!