Sprite question

[LeChuck]

I'm just wondering... If I've got a large sprite with a huge transparent area (that pink colour in the editor), will the transparent area make your game bigger or does AGS have a method of removing / compressing this irrelevant data? A bitmap image will be huge in size even if there's just one colour in there... Do you have to be careful to crop away parts of sprites that the game will view transparent?

[Khris]

It in general good practice to remove unnecessary transparent borders.
Having said that, AGS uses its own compression, so uni-colored areas shouldn't increase the filesize that much.
That's why the image format doesn't matter, btw.

[LeChuck]

It in general good practice to remove unnecessary transparent borders.

This is true, although it's very handy to leave some space on all sides of sprites that are being animated, in case you decide to make a character move his arms around or something. I've often made the sprite borders too small and it's come back to bite me in the ass many times. Thanks for the reply.

[Khris]

When you want to animate characters, keep in mind that the sprite's pivot is the bottom center, so as long as you add the same number of pixels to both sides of the sprite, the animation won't make the sprite move about.