3 replies to this topic

[kburkhart84]

See here.

Basically, in the case of iOS, my understanding is that an installer/game could be up to 2GB in size, but if the download is over the air, it has to be under 50MB. This issue can be worked around by simply using a land line via wi-fi(at least as far as I know). On the other hand, google play apps also have a limit of 50MB, but they can't simply work around it by using wi-fi, rather they now provide the "expansion files" that are described in the link above.

I know, many of the games that GM Studio will be used for won't be very large, but some of that is because we know the limits, and therefore have to limit the amount of graphics and distinct music we put in our games. I would suggest that GM allow the Android export to utilize said expansion files, so that we no longer have that limit. In theory the process for the game player is pretty smooth, and it would allow much larger games to be created with GM Studio for Android.

GM is such a good piece of software for 2d games, but if you wanted to make a larger RPG game(for example), you would be pretty limited, and would have to use the same music for many different game play areas due to said limits.

What do you guys think of this? I'm sure it would take some work to implement the "rules" for this, but I think it would be worth it in the long run. I would understand if it were to be added in the GM9 lineup though due to the effort it will take.

Discuss...

[chrscool8]

I dunno. I know retail games are coming in at tens of Gigs nowadays, but 50mb is actually hard to hit as long as you're optimizing correctly. Even full length high quality music is less than a megabyte in OGG format. Besides that, you're limited in the amount of graphics you can really use with the texture pages for mobile devices. Yeah, they can be swapped out, but you probably don't want to do that a lot. Right?

But I mean, yeah, the idea is sound. It would be nice to have a ... not hard way to do this SHOULD the situation arise.

Edited by chrscool8, 02 June 2012 - 11:13 PM.

[kburkhart84]

I agree, and that is a lot of the reason why I don't feel that this feature should be too high on the priority list, but I DO think it should be on the list. It is true that on mobile environments you don't want to waste space on too high quality music, but even so, a good "full-size" RPG could have over 20MB of that kind of music(even after lowering quality that you can't here on phones anyway) which leaves 30MB for the code and graphics(and sounds, which is very unlikely to be over a MEG or 2). Take a few MBs of that for the code and you would have only 25MB for the graphics.

The reason I mention RPGs is mainly because they tend to have the most actual media resources in them, as compared to other game genres. The "ambient" music is more important than your average shooter or platformer, and there tend to be more varied "settings" which require tile sets to not have the "grid" visible. Remember that a good "full" RPG with at the least 10 - 16 hours of gameplay on the SNES took usually between 4 to 6 MBs, but this isn't a good comparison. One, the music took very little space because it was stored in "tracker" style to be synthesized on the fly, not like the MP3s and OGGs we use today. And the graphics resolution was much smaller, so it took much less space to create the graphics while still having the high variety.

Try calculating how many MBs just the music would take for a game like FF6 or Chrono Trigger. I "estimated" all the different music themes from Chrono Trigger to number over 40, but if I keep it at 40, and if I keep the average low, like 2 minutes, and lets say you can get 2 minutes per MB, that would still be 20MB for just music. Reality is that the average is more than 2 minutes, and it may have been a little over 40 tracks, in I'm pretty sure that most of the tracks won't be able to be compressed to 2 minutes per MB(but I could be wrong on this one). Either way, 20MB is a fair amount of music for a game, and imagine how much space would be taken by the graphics in Chrono Trigger if you had higher resolution graphics like many games would use today.

[kburkhart84]

BUMP...

I think this is a pretty good suggestion, but no one paid much attention.... oh well. I'm not whining

Hopefully someone (like Mike) will see this suggestion.