Making my game smaller

[guybrush]

Hi everybody!
I have a problem, and it's in my game size. It's 29 MB-s big, and it's not even finished! I don't know what have I done to make it so big. So, are there any advices abou making my game files smaller (i know about packing with WinRAR or WinZip), because i know less people will download it when it's so big. Thank you!

[passer-by]

Could it be the colour depth or the music files?
I'm not really sure , but I think you can reduce colour depth without losing too much quality, especially with professional software. I used free tools and it  greatly reduced my game size.

[Ishmael]

Graphics, they're uncompressed. There isn't much to do about that, apart from trying the experimental compression option in AGS, or decreasing the amount of detail, in some essence, of the sprites to use less space...

[Scummbuddy]

Also, once you start zip your game, it will go down dramatically.

[Nethros]

Have you tried making it DOS? This may ruin the game a bit, but I think that helps the size go down. You can backup your game and try.

[Mats Berglinn]

You don't have to take down color depths or things like that to make them game smaller size. If you have BMP backgrounds sprites you can save them as PGN (GIF and JPEG ruins the graphics). For sound effects and music you can convert them into mp3 or ogg if you can (some sound editors can, I recommend you Audacity but if you want to convert into mp3 you got to get a special plug in but it's not too hard to find). Hope this will help.

[Scummbuddy]

Saving them as png or others wont matter. AGS has its own image compression, so saving them as anything other than bmp wont matter.

[Gilbert]

Have you tried making it DOS? This may ruin the game a bit, but I think that helps the size go down. You can backup your game and try.

Actually the DOS engine is even larger than the Windows engine (there's no DOS engine for V2.7+), and it won't ruin the game, since they're interchangeable, games compiled for DOS can be executed with the windows engine and vice versa, with small exceptions that the DOS engine doesn't support AVI playback and plugins.

[guybrush]

Thnx a lot everybody. Yes, I've used mp3 and ogg files for music. Changing the color depth just improved its performance. I just don't know what it is...
I hope ziping it will also help.
Take a look at this:


Is that really THAT much..?
Will "Rebuild all room files" files do something good?

[Mats Berglinn]

Saving them as png or others wont matter. AGS has its own image compression, so saving them as anything other than bmp wont matter.

Oh, ok. I didn't knew that, Scummbuddy.

[strazer]

Yes, I've used mp3 and ogg files for music.

Since mp3 and ogg are compressed already, zipping doesn't do much to them and the final zip file will roughly increase by the file size of each of these music tracks.

I hope ziping it will also help.

Absolutely. Because sprites are stored uncompressed, the game itself can be compressed a lot with zip and the like.
Why don't you just try and zip up your Compiled folder and see how much it goes down?

Is that really THAT much..?

Not really, but as Ishmael said, AGS v2.7 and below store the sprites uncompressed for performance reasons so the game size can grow a lot pretty fast.

Will "Rebuild all room files" files do something good?

No, this command just recompiles (opens and saves) all of your rooms, it doesn't do anything to the graphics.

[guybrush]

Ok, I've compressed it with WinRAR and 28MB-s are now 7 MB-s!! Whoa! Thnx Scummbouddy, thnx strazer. This is SOLVED.

[FlyRider]

Are there any plans for supporting sprite compression in later versions then?

[Ashen]

Well, if you'd read the 2.71 beta/RC thread:

The second change is optional sprite compression. There is a new option in the General Settings tab to compress sprites. This is done with a basic RLE compression scheme, but it should reduce the sprite file size by about 70%.

Please try looking these things up before posting, especially in a months old thread.

EDIT: For future reference, that thread (or one like it, sticky-ed at the top of the Tech Forum) would be the place to look for features in the current latest beta versions. I guess the Tracker List would be the place for things that might be implineted past that.

[FlyRider]

Ok, I'm really sorry for that, but I searched for it and did't find it. And since I'm pretty new to these forums I do not always know where to look manually. But thanks anyway