What does everyone else want for Christmas (obviously game dev or business related)? What tools? What tutorials? What assets?
What do I want?.. Hmm… I guess my wish list would include:
Corona Wishes
HTML5 export support
Business Wishes
A new dev machine (not happening, but I can wish)
More users who are willing to pay for help.
An additional good client. I’m down to two and that’s not cutting it any more.
Personal Wishes - Nothing! I’m happy and honestly don’t need any more toys or entertainment. So… health and happiness for myself, my family, and my friends.
1: That I could find it easier to understand code related stuff. I have always found it really really difficult to learn anything by reading books/tutorials. However, put me with a real person who can teach me and I pick stuff up really quickly as I’m able to ask questions directly. This is why it takes me so flippin long to get anything done in Corona.
2: A new dev machine. My old late 2009 iMac is really showing it’s age these days and that’s even after it was modernised with a bucket load of RAM and a fast SSD.
Why do you want " SpritePacker/TexturePacker " It’s doesn’t reduce the texture memory since android 4 (if I remember well), the size of the apk isn’t reduce significantly. It’s only reduce the loading time 0.005 sec by image not load (the time to open and read a file).
Before open GL xx (I don’t remember wich one) the impact was huge, because texture memory was only on 2^number x 2^sameNumber.
That’s mean an image of 2x257 px use a texture memory of 512x512 px
My wish :
Corona for universal windows app:
Corona run on their own server Desktop app converter to convert .exe to UWP. I need to admit that’s very difficult to do it by our own. Require a lot of space…
It’s a little thing but it can help a lot of developer
@remi it is not always about memory (anymore)… as a generalisation, a single atlas with many textures will render faster than lots of separate smaller textures.
@sphere game studios, it’s very interesting what you said, during my test I haven’t try to display a lot of image from different sprite and compare with image from a same sprite. Can you give more information about it? On android how many percent of time is win?
i’ve already got my wish, thanks to Vlad – fixing some of the more common crashes on android. (the openal one i’ve been worried about for a while) i know that bug-hunting isn’t “sexy” - as it doesn’t give your marketing department anything shiny to sell like a new feature would - but quality/stability/reliability is a big deal to some of us, and really hope a focus on ‘bullet-proof-ness’ will persist going forward.
@remi when you have lots of assets in a single atlas you are using a single texture as far as Open GL is concerned. When you render an asset from that texture there is no hit for the memory look up and loading of the texture into the frame buffer as it is already there.
Open GL can draw all assets from the same atlas in the same draw call. When you use lots of smaller images they can’t be batched and the changing of draw state does have an overhead.
Now, for a small number of assets you won’t notice any difference but when you are rendering hundreds or thousands per frame the performance difference will be noticeable.
Level editor or at least an official/built-in support for an external tool.
Basic text manipulation and styling - line height, line spacing, etc.
UI widgets that work and feel intuitive on all supported platform, not just the two mobile OS’s.
Extras:
An option to buy a permanent license (to put my own splash screen). Subscription-based payment models are doing some unpleasant things to my subconsciousness even if it’s something like $5/year and I’d do my best to drop it at the first chance I get.
Keep in mind that TexturePacker will conserve space when a lot of transparency is involved. It knows how to “pack” objects tightly which will actually save disk space.
@rob when we use some website as tinypng.com (that’s not the better), when there is a lot of empty space we save only a few Byte and not a few kilo Byte as far as I know compare to texture packer who pack a lot of images
A link to two compress folder, with and without texture packer, think to uncompress folder to compare size.
What packing method are you using? It looks like you’re using “basic” and not “MaxRect”. If you use “MaxRect” it trims most of the transparency out and makes much more packed files. Look at this example:
Your images are all on a grid so each frame’s transparency is being retained. In that case, it won’t save you any space. But if you see how tight TexturePacket can pack individual images, it will save disk space as well.
For me texture packer is obselete since 2014, I have done a lot of test and it’s very hard to optimize the texture memory because we need to remove some imagesheet when they are not use for long…
If we want to reduce the memory size we need to use APNG. APNG is a very good thing and it’s improve quite often. It’s a long time I follow APNG and a lot of system use it now as Google chrome since April