too large sprites...

[Iago]

Is the compiling duration influenced by the size of the sprites or solely by the number of sprites?

Is there a tool which will batch downscale all my animated gifs, without messing with the transparent regions (no antialiasing)?

And is there a method to reimport all sprites automatically?
(so that they are replaced by the downscaled versions)

thanks

--------------------------------

the background :

When I want to test the game, the compiling process (or whatever it is) takes about two minutes to complete. When Photoshop is open, I even run out of memory. The compiled game is then about 130 MB large!

That's new; when I had less animations yet the game compiled much faster( about 10 seconds)


Ok, I admit it:Ã,  considering that I haveÃ,  a 640x480 resolution my character sprites are to big (about 150 x 500) and it's useless to have them this big and have the scaled down by the engine.

[GarageGothic]

I'm pretty sure that the size matters as well (150 x 500 is friggin large!). Have you tried Jasc's Animation Shop? (http://www.jasc.com/en/products/animationshop/?) I'm pretty sure it has batch scaling, but not sure whether it has issues with anitaliasing - I remember I had some problems myself a year or so ago, but they may have beenÃ,  fixed now. I also believe that Animation Shop can do tiled animations so you can import the frames tiled instead of one at a time.

Edit: Just out of curiosity. What color depth are you running, and do you feel any impact on in-game performace with sprites that large?

[Iago]

Animation Shop claims being able to "pixel-resize" animations, but it still uses some kind of antialiasing.
I'm using 16bit colors and I have absolutely no performance breakdowns.
My Sysspecs:

Athlon 1800+
About 800MB Ram
Noname onboard 3D graphics card

[TerranRich]

Make sure the setting in Animation Shop under the Resize dialog box says "Pixel resize" and not something l ike 'Bilinear resample" or "Smart size". I know Paint Shop Pro has true pixel resizing, so Animation Shop should as well.

[Radiant]

I do believe this is a memory issue, so yes, the size of sprites matters. Note that windows tends to behave strangely if you're short on memory (try opening thirty MS Paint windows simultaneously and you'll see what I mean).