Overrides and memory

"pbox;803267" wrote:
Something I've always been wondering about .. how does the game actually behave when it encounters overrides / redundant data? Like when there's one resource 0000000000001234 in the game packages, and three with that same instance in the Mods folder: does it use four times as much memory since it's actually loading the thing four times, or does it skip the first three and only reads the last one?

Our package system is designed to handle redundant data. Since the packages is /Mods are configured to have the highest priority, only that data would be loaded should any redundancies exist. It does not use more memory, as it would only load the resource once. When the game attempts to load a resource, it is unaware of duplicate entries. For every unique key, it expects one and only one resource to exist.

"pbox;803267" wrote:

Edit, also, when there are multiple overrides of the same thing in /Mods, is there a rule of thumb to determine which one loads last? (I seem to recall in one of the previous games it wasn't just alphanumerical but something to do with the hierarchy of subdirectories .. also, alphanumerical? alphabetical? asciibetical? Something else entirely?)

I believe you can control the priority inside subdirectories by copying the configuration file and editing the priority. I'm not sure what happens if collisions exist for the same priority. I would suspect the behavior to be non-deterministic, but I will find out for sure for you.