I heard recently that certain characters in your package file names will slow down your game because the game has a harder time reading them (the ones I heard about are ones like [, (, and -), and by removing them, you can speed up your loading times and such. Is this true?

Amd also, does this apply if you combine your packages and make sure the combined package file name doesn't have any of these characters, or do you need to go through and change the name of each individual file to not include these characters before combining them? When I open up a combined package file in s3pe, there isn't any mention as far as I can tell of any of the original package files with the characters included.

I don't have any personal experience with it (because my folders aren't fixed up yet, and I mainly have experience with TS2), but many people say so, and many people say that their games load much faster when they rename the files.

0-9, a-z, A-Z, - and _ are the characters that are safe to put in a filename (although not commas, and spaces aren't the best to use, either).

As for other characters, they can result in anything from no ill effects, to slowing down the system, to not being read at all (particularly period marks, as they can make the file think anything after it is a file extension).

As always, better safe than sorry. If you are renaming files, better avoid the possibly troublesome characters.

As for combining packages, someone else have to answer that question. My guess is that it might help, though that depends on whether the resource files are combined into one package (then it probably will help), or if the package files themselves are combined as separate items with the filename attached somehow (then you'll probably have to rename all of them before combining).

file this one under rumors false. It's not the name of the file, so much as what's inside it.