This might be a stupid question and I have looked everywhere on the forums, but cant seem to find what I'm looking for, I'm developing a game at 640x480 (16bit color), so far I have three rooms and zipped the game is sitting at 4 and half megs! so what I'm asking is, apart from resoloution and color depth (and sound encoding) does anyone have any tips on how to keep your filesize to a minumum? how to optimize those bitmaps? I'm creating the graphics with 3ds Max, and they rock but I need the high resoloution and colour for them to work effectively. also I have a demo ready, and have uploaded it to: kycos, freeweb and a couple of others, but the damn link never works! can someone do a step by step upload tutorial for zip files onto lycos or something?
Click the link in here MicroTech Free File Hosting (http://12.22.230.41/MicroTech/FileHosting.html)
And fill in the info like your email etc (they won't sell your info) and upload your file .It will give you the link to your file and just put that on the forum so everyone can download your game .
Help with the file size I can't ..
Look for the diff file size load page when you upload your game .
AGS games are known to be rather large in size. However, they compress very well with programs like WinZip etc.
Have you tried zipping your compiled folder? In most cases, you can reduce its size by 50% and more.
True. My DEMO for my game, By the Sword, is over 50MB normally, but shrinks down to 18.6MB when ZIPped. :)
I think he already meaned the game was zipped:
Quote
so far I have three rooms and zipped the game is sitting at 4 and half megs!
If you use sound samples, they can also be the cause of large sizes. If you're using uncompressed formats like .WAV you may try to compress them into MP3s or OGGs. Moreover, you can use lower sampling rate and bitrates, if you can sacrifice the quality loss.
I'd also recommend Inno Setup which you can get here
http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php
It uses compression much better than winzip or winrar or winace
I think it uses 7zip which is the highest compression, but this is also an installer program, so the user doesn't need to have a zip program to unzip.
I can compress my current project, which is in 640 by 480 16bit from
48.8 MB to 2.43MB
although I'm using 16-bit colour, most of my backgrounds would be exactly the same in 256, but it does include over 80 backgrounds and almost 4000 sprites
/me hates installers.
I'm not a big fan of installers either but the compression is great, I've tried 7zip on it's own before and It always made corrupt files for me. I'll have to give it another try sometime.
7zip was good in compression (I always use it), but it's just better to use more popular formats for distributing files (installers and other formats are really unfriendly to me dos users :P I can extract them under window$, rezip them and play them under DOS, but that's a bit cumbersome).
Sorry to keep this slightly off topic
I tried 7zip just then and I remember now, it wasn't corrupt files, it was the fact that you needed to have the program to unzip .7z files.
also the compression wasn't quite as good as inno setup by about 400kb at the highest compression level, strange
It's probably best to provide a couple of alternatives if you want everyone to play your games, but not really necessary unless it becomes popular. (then if it's popular the DOS users won't d/l it anyway) (http://www.imageshack.us/img2/3968/trans18.gif)
Hey guys Just a big thank you for all the tips and tricks, I will try all of them, will let you know how it goes
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