Use a different resolution?

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

Greetings,

My game capacity will be around 1GB, but if I remove low resolution and only keep high resolution (2x), I can let it to 700MB.

I am very curious, will everyone prepare images with different resolutions?

I saw other articles in which some people only used a single high-quality image to correspond to the market.

I want to use only 1920*1280 images, because nowadays very few phones will only deal with 960*640.

But I am still hesitant to delete it and want to hear more opinions. 

Thank you.  :smiley:

#2

Curious as to why to you need even 700mb worth of images? What format are they in?

#3

A large number of compressed PNG-8 files.

Multiple monsters, each monster has several actions and uses a high number of frames, so it still requires a lot of capacity after compression.

#4

How many images per image?

Have you tried saving for web!!!

#5

Loading a single 1920x1280 resolution image will require 16MB of texture memory. So, it really depends on how many concurrent images you are loading.

This may be an issue with some very old and/or low end devices. However, I would expect that the 300MB extra hard drive requirement would prove more difficult for those devices. On the plus side, if you only have the larger resolution images, every user will benefit from needing to invest less hard drive space on your app.

That being said, I’d recommend considering only using the larger images. Most users will look at the size of your app and will think twice before downloading a behemoth like that.

#6

@w967 That seems to be getting more troublesome.

@XeduR  I agree with you.

I look at the opinions of the players on many websites. For >1G games, they will hesitate to download them.

I want to give the player a great gaming experience , so the content will be very sufficient, which also creates a huge demand for hard drive space.

Indeed,old phones with poor performance may not be able to afford such a large capacity.   :lol:

#7

This is a common struggle that we all face, balancing quality, performance and package size.  And only you can decide what is important and where you can sacrifice.

If not working on older devices is okay, then don’t worry about providing low res assets. 1080p images (1920x1080) are sufficient for all current mobile devices and most desktop devices that you are going to build for.  There is only a handful of 4K devices that you would be potentially building for.  If it were me, I’d just shoot for that one resolution and call it a day. To help keep package sizes down use JPEGs for any solid rectangular image, and PNGs when transparency is important.

#8

@ Rob

Thank you for your mention, just now I converted the super high quality PNG background image to JPEG, and the capacity is instantly reduced by half. :lol:

I use 1920*1280 because my game is landscape.

I draw a lot of high quality character image and part of it as a card for players to pay.

I am concerned that overstretching will destroy the shape of the image, so use 1920*1280.

Or my thoughts are wrong, 1280 will destroy the quality, should I use 1920*1080?

I hope you can give me some guidance.

Thank you.

#9

1920/1280 is an aspect ratio of 1.5:1 The 1080p screens are a 16:9 aspect ratio. I recommend you read https://coronalabs.com/blog/2018/08/08/understanding-content-scaling-in-corona/

Spend some time digesting that.  It will help you understand the relationship between screens, content and images.

Rob

#10

This isn’t really relevant to the kinds of things I’m building at the moment, but I wanted to chime in with an idea…

Once an app is installed to a device, that device isn’t going to change. It’s screen and therefore optimal resolution is somewhat set in stone. So - would it not be possible for an app to be shipped with minimal assets, and on initial launch have it check the device resolution and download the relevant asset pack for that resolution? Thus massively reducing the initial app store file size + greatly reducing the installed app size even after downloading the highest quality assets needed for the individual device?

Admittedly this would require server space and server side bandwidth usage, but that’s not much of a downside.

#11

1 GB for a mobile game - are you for real?

I run HD worlds with a vast amount of assets and stay under 100MB.

#12

@richard, that’s doable and I’ve encountered several apps that do it just like that. But, as you hinted at, the developer would then have to worry about the delivery network’s security, speed and reliability. What happens if for some reason you have 500 people trying to download your app’s extra assets simultaneously? Will there be a waiting list or can the server handle 500 concurrent downloads?

Then there’s the possibility of users feeling cheated because they downloaded a 50-100MB app that then downloads additional 300-1000MB of assets. What if their device lacks the hard drive space that they didn’t know of or if they would never consider downloading apps larger than 250MB due to wanting that hard drive space elsewhere or not wanting to download files so large?

Some users might also download the game at home and wait until they leave the house in order to play it, e.g. getting on a bus, which could prove problematic unless the users have unlimited data plans.

It is a cool idea, but I’d recommend that small studios, indies and hobbyists just leave the heavy lifting to the app stores.

#13

Your points are very valid. 

Even the largest and most wasteful 3D apps - with tonnes of video ~= 1GB.

It is just ridiculous! No app ever does animations at 1920x1280.

#14

Thinking again, you wouldn’t actually need to worry about having a server at all, let alone configuring it for a high number of concurrent downloads. Just drop the assets into a CDN bucket and you’re covered all round then. This would only be feasible for paid apps though… We use the Rackspace CDN for a number of projects and it’s priced at around 6p per 1gb bandwidth usage so probably too expensive otherwise.

Your points on users waiting until they’re unable to download more files and then opening for the first time though, are a good point :thinking:

#15

@ Rob 

Thank you for your assistance.

Maybe my initial assessment was wrong, 16:9 should be more suitable for me.

@richard @XeduR  

I have an extra download using Amazon S3, but as XeduR said, the download stability is not very good.

The huge demand for asset downloads does make users feel cheated.

@SGS

If you view it on the Play Store, the top 100 games must download an additional 1GB file in the game.

I even downloaded a 2D Game that requires 2GB or even 3GB, and the game is still in the top 10.

However, it is really wrong to make animations on 1920*1280. After using 1920*1080, many animations can be greatly reduced.

I should be able to control it at 300~400MB.

In the process of compression optimization, music files always occupy the most capacity. After converting to MP3, 1 song needs 3~4MB, which is one of the reasons for my huge capacity. :lol:

#16

The top 100 games are all tiny hyper casual style games.

I’m curious, what 2D game requires 2GB?

If music is your issue then I would include a few tracks and stream the rest.

#17

Oh, I am a Taiwanese.

The Play Store on our side is almost all RPG type social games, a lot of music, animation, special effects.

According to the report,Taiwan is ranked among the top 5 global markets for Google Play.

#18

That’s actually immensely interesting. Living in the west, it’s difficult to contemplate how these things differ outside of our zone, but I do know that Android has the Eastern market due to the vast number of Android devices available and their variety in price.

I expect there’s actually a massive difference in what’s popular from the app stores across each country. Countries where the majority of Android users are rich will likely have more resource demanding apps in the popular list than countries where the majority of Android users go for the lower end devices.

Something we should probably all be thinking about as developers. Know your audience and all that.

#19

Curious as to why to you need even 700mb worth of images? What format are they in?

#20

A large number of compressed PNG-8 files.

Multiple monsters, each monster has several actions and uses a high number of frames, so it still requires a lot of capacity after compression.