Topic: Maximum background dimensions.

[Nine Toes]

I tried drawing a background in MSPaint, 5760px x 5760px*.  It really bogged my computer down.  I was wondering what is the limit as to what dimensions a room's background can be?

I did a little bit of digging, and I found this old thread.

Also, I came across this as well:

CJ: The maximum room height is 1400 pixels (at 320x200 resolution - you could have a 2800-tall 640x400 room).

    I asked CJ for clarification:

CJ: The pathfinder uses an 1400-sized array for storing potential routes, and there's one row for each line.

    That means in 320x200 and 320x240 the maximum room background height is 1400 pixels, in 640x400, 640x480 and 800x600 it's 2800 pixels. In theory, there's no width limit.

However, the reason why I bring up this question, is because it's been quite a few years since that thread was posted, and AGS has gone through several upgrades since then, notably, the implementation of native coordinates.

Has this changed since AGS~2003, or is the background height limit still 1400px for 320x200 res (2800px for 640x400 res)?

*Just so you know: I don't actually need a background that big, I was just experimenting, and would like to know what my limits are.

[Matti]

I don't know what the limits are but I used a 25000 px long background (with a 1024x678 resolution) and it worked well..

[GarageGothic]

In this thread, CJ clarified that there's no longer any height limit for rooms, but that the pathfinder doesn't scale well to large rooms which is probably causing your slowdown.

[barefoot]

Hi

regarding file size its best to save in gif or jpg as these formats reduce the files size, whereas bmp usually saves at a higher file size..

[NsMn]

Don't ever use JPGs for AGS games. No. Don't. Really No.

[Matti]

regarding file size its best to save in gif or jpg as these formats reduce the files size, whereas bmp usually saves at a higher file size..

Like NsMn said, don't ever use jpgs, use pngs instead. Also notice that it doesn't matter which size the files have because AGS saves the images in its own format.

[Ryan Timothy]

Well if it's a photograph background, it'll already be in jpg, no sense in changing it.
But anything from digitally hand painted or pixel art, would obviously be better as png.

[monkey_05_06]

In my experience PNG usually gets better compression (smaller file size) as well as being lossless which means if you're doing pixel-art or low resolution work it's not going to get F!$@ed up just because you wanted to save the image. JPEG and GIF are both lossy formats which means you will lose information about the image while saving it.

As Ryan said if you're using a photograph directly as it was taken from a camera, it's most likely already been saved to JPEG format (and is usually a high enough resolution that the loss of image information is negligible at the time the image is taken. However, if you're modifying the image in any way and resaving it, then it's better to use PNG. Always. The only excuse for not using PNG is if you want an animation in which you're (for compatibility reasons) stuck with GIF. There is the MNG format which uses PNG compression on animated images, but it's not widely supported enough to constitute its use (unfortunately).

[Matti]

Wait a sec. Why exactly do we post unrelated stuff into an old digged up thread?

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I don't know where you got the idea that GIF is a lossy format but you're completely off base, monkey.  It uses LZW compression which is perfectly lossless for 8-bit images.  This also makes animated gifs ideal for pixel art since as you mentioned there's really no viable competitor.

[monkey_05_06]

Huh...I guess I just thought it would be considered "lossy" given that it only supports 256 colors + 1-bit alpha where as PNG supports 32-bit colors+alpha. I guess I was confusing "lossless [compression]" with "limited palette".