Huge Compiled Size

[MurrayL]

Hey guys,

Some of you may know that I'm making a pretty big game at the moment. The background art is 1024x768 and all the sprites are full colour and alpha-blended.

I have barely 1/10th of my graphics in the editor at the moment (perhaps not even that) and the compiled .exe is already over 50MB in size!
The actual source graphics folder (and I mean ALL of the graphics for the game; including stuff that isn't even in AGS yet) is only 40MB, but every new sprite I import seemingly adds another megabyte or so; why is AGS hugely inflating everything?

I haven't even begun to add sound or music yet, and if there isn't a way to make AGS play nice then my game is going to end up being 1GB or more. 

I have tried using the compress sprites option, but it made no difference at all.

[ThreeOhFour]

Not sure if this'll help, but have you tried compressing it up into a .zip or .rar file?

I never bother too much about size as my games are pretty small, but I do know that I get some pretty crazy compression ratios on pretty much everything bar music and sound for my games, so it might not be as bad as you think 

(Just did a quick check, and the best I've found so far was 81% compression  )

[MurrayL]

Yes, I can compress the final compiled version into a zip or rar, but doing that only alleviates the symptoms of the underlying problem - that problem being why AGS has decided that all my sprites should be three times (or more) larger in filesize than they actually are.

[Gilbert]

For speed reasons, sprites data in AGS are either uncompressed or simply RLE encoded (if you check the "compress sprite data" option), so it's just normal that the game would be much larger than having the original graphics files scattering around, if they're compressed as "normal graphics formats" like say, PNG or JPEG. This is especially noticeable if your graphics are quite "complex" (say, like photorealistic ones or with many variations in colours) as RLE is certainly not very effective in such cases.
Most people don't mind much about this, as long as their game could be compressed effectively as a ZIP or RAR file for distribution.
There isn't much you can do against this, apart from possibly simplifying the graphics, optimising them or even, reduce the colour depth of your game to say, highcolour.

[TerranRich]

Most people nowadays have enough internet bandwidth to download the compressed game file, and enough hard drive space to uncompress and install it. So I wouldn't worry too much. Hell, I'm surprised that your final 1024x768 game will "only" be about 500-600 MB.

[Pumaman]

I have tried using the compress sprites option, but it made no difference at all.

It's worth noting that the Compress Sprites option isn't picked up until the next time you edit some sprites, so if you just change it and save the game nothing will happen. This is something that will be changed in the next version of AGS so that you can see the difference immediately.