[http://sourceforge.net/p/ufoai/feature-requests/539 Item 539] imported from sourceforge.net tracker on 2013-01-28 20:22:06

We have a lot of copies of especially normalmaps (in the future spec-maps, rm maps, and so on also) in our current repo.

We could reduce the sizes of the installer and specifically the models and textures folders if we would introduce a system to symlink those normalmaps also.

There is one big problem with the symlink stuff though:
It is somehow hard to find out if a texture already has a normalmap or a file is symlinked if this is just defined in the symlink txt file, but the file is physically non-existent in its respective folder. The artist does not see the symlinked stuff by looking at specific folder contents !

Maybe a tool could create 1 byte dummy files for all the stuff that is defined via symlinks in the respective folders ?

It should name the symlinked stuff like this: head02(symlink-head01.png).md2 or box012_nm(symlink-box01_nm.png).png

Ofc. the helper script to create the dummy files could also be created at a later time, but it should be created, so artists would have less complications...
The dummy files would ofc. be removed from any release version, those are development only.