How big SHOULD acsprset.spr be?

[Jared]

Okay, I've read up on what exactly the acsprset.spr file is and what it does... and the issues with uncompressed sprites all taking up the same amount of HDD space, fine I get it... but I'm working on a 800x600 game that's got more animations than most AGS titles (I see this will effect it, obviously..) and currently acsprset.spr is 474mb. Bear in mind I have not finished the intro sequence. This strikes me as very big - or is this just in the ballpark for games of this resolution?

I haven't actually finished a game before so I'm not sure if the size goes down once it's compiled or anything like that. If anyone could shed some light on whether this is even a potential problem, that'd be great (because I figure trying to fix it later on could only be more difficult)

[Trent R]

I think there's some glitch in the version of AGS that is available on the website where the acsprset will get huge. IIRC, there was a thread in the Tech Forum not long ago reporting it. I also believe that it's supposed to be fixed in the beta release.

Of course though, betas are usually risky.

[Edit]: You may want to disregard what I've written. I think I may have gotten some things mixed up, but the mentioned thread is found here. And what is mentioned from the beta thread is

* Fixed sprite cache corruption if you had a single sprite larger than 20 MB

So I'm probably wrong...


~Trent

[Gilbert]

No, the game's size won't go smaller after compilation.

If you want to have some reduction in the file size of the sprites, check the 'Compress the sprite file' option in the General Settings. (Though there shouldn't be problems, for safety's sake, backup your game files before doing that.) Note that I cannot guarantee how far the file size can be reduced as AGS uses only a rather basic method of compression (RLE, for performance reasons) for sprites and it depends on how 'complex' the sprites (e.g. photorealistic sprites with lots of variation in colours vs. flat-shaded cartoony ones) you are using.

Nonetheless when you distribute your game you're most likely compressing it to ZIP/RAR/whatever (unless you're distributing it in disc media) and there should be further reduction in the file size after compression.