ImageMap VS Design Resolutions" Performance Sweet Spot?
by Eric Robinson · in Torque Game Builder · 07/18/2007 (5:40 pm) · 2 replies
I came across this thread in my morning perusal and was reminded of some optimizations that I did for the demo I completed a few weeks ago. Essentially, I shrank the size of my source images and noticed speed improvements, memory improvements, and rendering improvements. Those optimizations, similar to those recommended in the previous thread, suggest a kind of "sweet spot".
All of my ImageMaps were sourced from 1024x1024 or 2048x2048 PNG files... non-tiled. I wanted to keep the resolution as high as possible on the images as I wanted to see if I could get the game to run as beautifully as possible at a 1920x1200 screen resolution.
The demo, a platformer style game, would run hiccup-y; the scene would jerk as I scrolled through the level. It took a bit of time to load the demo and actually start playing. Overlapping ImageMap edges would flicker... As my test window only ran at a fraction of the target resolution, I thought "Maybe I'm asking T2D to do too much work to resize the images for the given resolution." After reducing the source image dimensions on all of my files, I noticed a marked increase in all of the aforementioned areas: gone was the edge flickering, performance hiccups, and painful load times.
That being said, perhaps the larger source files would actually work fine at the larger screen resolution where the engine would be asked to do much less reduction work (and perhaps at time, increase the image size). Hmm.
This suggests that there may be a good "sweet spot" for ImageMap source resolution given a specific design resolution. Anyone have any experience playing around with this kind of thing? Is there a good rule of thumb?
All of my ImageMaps were sourced from 1024x1024 or 2048x2048 PNG files... non-tiled. I wanted to keep the resolution as high as possible on the images as I wanted to see if I could get the game to run as beautifully as possible at a 1920x1200 screen resolution.
The demo, a platformer style game, would run hiccup-y; the scene would jerk as I scrolled through the level. It took a bit of time to load the demo and actually start playing. Overlapping ImageMap edges would flicker... As my test window only ran at a fraction of the target resolution, I thought "Maybe I'm asking T2D to do too much work to resize the images for the given resolution." After reducing the source image dimensions on all of my files, I noticed a marked increase in all of the aforementioned areas: gone was the edge flickering, performance hiccups, and painful load times.
That being said, perhaps the larger source files would actually work fine at the larger screen resolution where the engine would be asked to do much less reduction work (and perhaps at time, increase the image size). Hmm.
This suggests that there may be a good "sweet spot" for ImageMap source resolution given a specific design resolution. Anyone have any experience playing around with this kind of thing? Is there a good rule of thumb?
#2
07/18/2007 (6:22 pm)
For starters, I tiled the images (put several in one source file). One static background is 1280x1024 (doesn't move at all). Backgrounds in general are 512x512 or smaller. Most level assets are 256x256 (including character sprites) at this point. 
Torque Owner Sean Dugan