Character export question

[Danne]

I have a question about using the character export function. The character I'm exporting consists of 100 sprites, they are from the eight walk-views, five views with 20 sprites each with three flipped views. The file size of each sprite is about 15k so the size of the 100 sprites is about 1,5 megs. The sprites are in png format.

When I export the character the size of the file created is about 28 megs. Why is there such a big difference in size?

Dan

[Scorpiorus]

That's because AGS doesn't compress sprites. When you was importing you png sprite in the game AGS converted it to bmp (which is bigger). Exported character files (.cha) store bmps, not png.

EDIT: Try to zip a character file. That should reduce its size significantly.

~Cheers

[Danne]

Thanks, now I understand. Do you know if this will be changed in future versions?

Dan

[Scorpiorus]

AGS converts sprites to bitmaps for perfomance reasons, so it hasn't decode an image file before showing it on the screen, thus it works faster. As about .cha file it won't work to convert to png (image quality loss can occur), then (on character import) back to bmp etc. Something like simple RLE bmp compression would be suitable but again the file can be compressed by an external archiver. The first things Chris does implement that can't be workarounded somehow else, so I don't think we'll see that in the near future.

~Cheers

[Danne]

Ok. Thanks. I'm just hoping that having a couple of 28 meg characters on the screen at the same time will not slow the game down.

Dan