How large is too large for an app?

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

Following on from my previous question about size of sprite sheets, I just did a check on the apps I’ve got on my ipod at the moment. Checking in iTunes, I see they range from around 40mb up to a whopping 138mb for a new app.

I work as a web developer so file size is always an issue. Perhaps I’m stressing over nothing. Is it normal for game apps to stretch to 138mb? Perhaps a sprite sheet of 430kb isn’t such a problem?
[import]uid: 55068 topic_id: 10937 reply_id: 310937[/import]

#2

A 430kb spritesheet is huge and you can only keep x many of them in RAM otherwise you will run out of texture memory.

The answer to your question will be : do you plan to do any android? android only supports 40mb on the phone unless you specify at install that it needs the SD card.

Also, at 138MB means you have to be either connected to a mac to download -

if you can break apart the game the better

c. [import]uid: 24 topic_id: 10937 reply_id: 39798[/import]

#3

Most corona made games hover around the 10mb mark give or take a megabyte or two. So unless you create something truly gigantic your’ll fall within this download size.

– Chris [import]uid: 33866 topic_id: 10937 reply_id: 39805[/import]

#4

Thanks for the replies.

Interesting!

There must be something I haven’t figured out yet. I was looking at the Plants vs Zombies app. Each character on screen there has at least 200 frames of animation each - a sprite sheet containing that would need to be massive. And there are often a number of different characters on screen at the same time. Unless the animation in that game, and others like it, is done programatically.

I’m going to experiment and see if I can find a way to reduce the file sizes.

Cheers

Tom [import]uid: 55068 topic_id: 10937 reply_id: 39824[/import]

#5

For anyone struggling with this, here’s the solution I found.

  1. Use less frames. 25 frames can look just as good as 40.

  2. I was using 24bit PNG. Using RGBA444 is a 16 bit system that still has 4096 colours and 16 transparency.

  3. Use trimmed sprites and a separate .lua file with the sprite data in it.

  4. Buy TexturePacker. Just found this today and it lets you do all the settings you need and exports the corona file too. I had been using Zwoptex but this new tool is better in my opinion.

My sprite file is now 66kb. [import]uid: 55068 topic_id: 10937 reply_id: 39919[/import]