Topic: Question of size

[YOke]

It's an old discussion, but it would be good if people could share their techniques to keep AGS game sizes down in size when unzipped too.

- Any way of making backgrounds take less space?
- How to compress sounds and what codec to choose?
- Anything else you can think of.

The reason for asking is the posibility of releasing a game on CD. If the game is to run from the CD it has to be uncompressed. If the game is large enough and has lots of animations it could be a tight fit.

[Radiant]

1. only by reducing color depth (i.e. 8-bit graphics take up half as much space as 16-bit graphics). AGS stores backgrounds in its internal way, and you can't change that.

2. use MP3 or OGG for sound effects and music. Better still, for music use MIDI (and note that there is no feasible way of converting MP3 to MIDI, but quite a bunch of good MIDIs exist on the 'net)

3. note that an AGS game without extra files (e.g. no music.vox) can be run from inside a zipfile!

4. a CD can hold 650 Mb. I've yet to see an AGS game of that size

[Privateer Puddin']

Perhaps this http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=16936.0 might work for the 1st one..

[SSH]

Well, most games on CD are compressed and use an installer to expand onto hard disk...

You can get programs that add an in-memory self-extractor to an EXE, so that it self extracts into memory (rather than disk) and then runs the extracted code.

Also, would a 650Mb AGS game need 650Mb of memory to run? If someone has that much memory then:

a) They've probably got a DVD drive
b) They've probably got enough HD space to install

[Pumaman]

The reason for asking is the posibility of releasing a game on CD. If the game is to run from the CD it has to be uncompressed. If the game is large enough and has lots of animations it could be a tight fit.

AGS games don't tend to run properly directly from the CD; you'd need to install it to the hard drive -- in which case, you can have it compressed on the CD anyway.

Also, would a 650Mb AGS game need 650Mb of memory to run?

No, most of the data (ie. rooms and sprites) is only loaded when needed. For example, I recently tested an AGS game which is about 630 MB on disk, and when running the game it used up about 30 MB RAM (checked with task manager).

[Helli78]

I recently tested an AGS game which is about 630 MB on disk

which name has this game.... and why it soooo big ....?
good graphics or many dialogs or whatever-else?

and, the important question,  can this game be downloaded somewhere....

[strazer]

For this type of question, please write a personal message instead of digging up old threads. Thank you.