Facepacks slow the game down

[Darth Rob]

Do facepacks slow the game down at all?

I'm talking on quite a high end scale e.g. if you have 70,000 in a single folder with a 4mb xml file. That's got to have an effect hasn't it?

Is there anything that can be done to combat any potential problems. For instance will splitting them into smaller team folders each with their own xml file help?

Or what about compressing the xml files by removing all whitespace and comments?

[michaeltmurrayuk]

The only difference it will make is to the load speed of the game when you start FM, however you can reduce this by turning on the skin cache. Once you have loaded FM the amount of face packs makes no difference to the speed of the game.