Hi...noob question. I have looked at the manual and did a search but I can't seem to find a definitive answer.
I am screenshotting a game for a fan game I am trying to make. In the beginning I was saving them as .BMP but I now realise that was a mistake because of the large file size. Keeping in mind I want my game to be a reasonably sized download (not too big) but also have good quality images, what file format should I be saving them as?
The general format these days is png and jpg should be avoided.
Forgive me, but I do not fully understand what kind of screenshots you are asking about? Are they for showing your game to other people, or using for savedgames?
JPEG may be pretty fair for screenshots. PNGs may be larger, especially if image resolution is high. I think converting to JPEG with quality of 75-90% produces good results for resolutions around 800x600 and higher. Lower resolutions may suffer from decreased quality that JPEG do, but with higher resolutions the impact will be barely noticeable; at least I am judging on my own experience.
PNG is good when you need the image to keep all detals precisely to pixel. If this is not the case, JPEG provides a good alternative (and saves disk space).
Since you're asking about game size, I assume you're talking about room backgrounds?
AGS uses its own format, so the image's format doesn't matter; you could in theory delete the image after importing it into your game, whether as sprite or room background.
So you should definitely use PNG, jpeg will decrease the image quality and pixelart or low color graphics suffer especially.
I get it! He makes a fangame and takes screenshots from the original to import them into the game*.
All of the above applies. Avoid jpg, it is prone to decrease quality. Png is the format of choice. And as Khris said, AGS converts everything you import, so the file size will depend on your resolution and amount of graphics imported, but not format.
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* Ghost wins a cookie!
Quote from: Ghost on Sat 11/01/2014 21:20:22
I get it! He makes a fangame and takes screenshots from the original to import them into the game*.
All of the above applies. Avoid jpg, it is prone to decrease quality. Png is the format of choice. And as Khris said, AGS converts everything you import, so the file size will depend on your resolution and amount of graphics imported, but not format.
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* Ghost wins a cookie!
Yes that's what im doing. Sorry for not being more clear. It looks like PNG is the way to go then, unless there is some reason not to which hasn't been said yet...
If you're taking artwork from an existing game, it might be worth checking the http://www.spriters-resource.com/ to see if the work has already been done for you. There are other sites as well.
I Always Prefer Png AnyHow :)