Save Room by Using Only Retina Graphics and Scale by .5 ?

Games
#1

I’m trying to keep my app under 20MB but with 57 pictures in it (plus the game graphics) I’m not having much success.

I was wondering, what if I used 640x960 graphics and just did a scale(.5, .5) on them after loading when not on an iPhone 4 or iPad?

This is a puzzle game without need for squeezing every ounce of speed, etc., so I’m wondering if this would work. Am I overlooking something?

Kind of wanted to ask before changing a bunch of my code. :slight_smile:

Jay
[import]uid: 9440 topic_id: 8058 reply_id: 308058[/import]

#2

It’s really up to your graphics quality requirements and the detail in the images. Eg: I have a game where every image is extremely detailed so one device version will look terrible if it is scaled up by 2 or down by .5, so I’ve had to provide both (which has tipped it over the 20MB limit.)

Test it on the target devices…

If you’re having trouble, you can always build it for each size of device and just distribute the one with larger, more detailed images, as “… HD”, but personally I’m against that if there’s no difference in the game play. [import]uid: 8271 topic_id: 8058 reply_id: 28738[/import]

#3

That approach mostly works fine but with a few caveats. What horacebury mentions is true, that you can’t optimize the graphics for each resolution, but honestly that only matters if the images are really small so you need to optimize every pixel. For most graphics it just doesn’t matter.

More important is texture memory usage. If you load up a large image and then scale it to .5 that means it’s using up 4 times as much texture memory as it needs to. And older devices without Retina displays also have less texture memory available, so you have to be wary of running out. [import]uid: 12108 topic_id: 8058 reply_id: 29210[/import]