Tiled - Good or bad?

[Steel Beast 6Beets]

Large pictures do not just contribute to game lag, but also file size. File size is an important deciding factor in deciding whether to bother with a free game on the internet. Can I try it out now? Or do I have to wait 2 minutes? 10 minutes? An hour? There have been some RPG Maker things that I have been interested in, but was not willing to download 100something Megabytes of data to play it. Not worth the time, or the bandwidth.

I was under the impression that music (read: MP3s) made the bulk of a game's file size. I had no idea that it could also be chalked up to pictures and the like.

[MechanicalPen]

Music is probably a bigger part than pictures, honestly. An MP3 of music suitable for an RPG is around 5MB. A picture of one map is around 1-2MB. But keep in mind any given RPG probably has more maps than music.

Still, I can see why someone would want to use a picture as a map. Just, do your players a favor and compress your images!

[Steel Beast 6Beets]

Good point. A professional game has easily like more than 300 maps. If all of them were pictures, we'd had a really bloated game file, even without having MP3s as music.

[DerVVulfman]

Hence, why Final Fantasy VII for the PC had 4 CDs. All those renderings and cool music.

[JayRay]

yeah, those pictures as big as they are, once compressed into a game project, actually DO get smaller, and then if you can say change your flat images to say JPG at 256 colors? as long as you're not trying to go too far out there with color contrasts, you can probably get away with it. My thing is though, with pre-rendered backdrops, getting it to 256 is a downgrade, whereas a lot of pixel art stuff can survive and still look pretty vibrant with 256 colors.

nature of the beast I'm afraid.