Max size of tile sheets?

#1 Yeah, it's pretty nasty. The editor really doesn't like anything wider than 2048 apparently either. If you notice the "Image Size" in the prevew set to "1", and the preview doesn't show an image.. don't bother trying to load it :)
The editor is slightly more picky than my hardware I think because I was able to crash out the level editor loading up an image that was waaaaaay too big, but that had worked in prior versions in script.

So I did some searching and came across this thread:
www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=36094

The solution for me meant going back through and recreating my images in 1024x1024 sizes and then using the Linked image maps to group my images together to make my animations. Painful, yes.. but worth it for backwards compatibility with older hardware.

Hope this helps.

Edit: I agree the documentation of this could use some work though to avoid these kinds of questions.
-Andrew

#2 @Andrew - One thing that dawned on me when discussing the large image maps with Russell was that they really are not necessary for a single character with lots of animations. Since your only usually playing one animation per frame (unless you have several of these characters on screen) then your just as efficient by having one animation per image map.

This seems to help with the image map height limitations and difficulty picking out frames in the Animation Builder.

#3 Thanks Andrew. As it turns out (edit: and as Tom mentions above), we're just going to break animation cycles up into smaller tilesheets, so I have a workaround for now. A ten-frame running animation in eight directions of course produced a tilesheet with 80 frames, and due to another problem I'm having, creating animations from these frames was, um... arduous.

Quote:"Edit: I agree the documentation of this could use some work though to avoid these kinds of questions.

And apparently the error message needs to be revised... not just the taller/wider issue, but maybe a clarification about the file format. The current error begs the question: "so can other file formats be taller than 2048?". Possibly I should have posted this to the bugs forum.

Russell

#4 @Tom: that's pretty much what I did, but several of my animation sequences were quite complex and filled 2 1024x1024 images. I was also going to mention that setting up linked image maps in the level editor caused me all kinds of grief the other day, too. Linked Image maps weren't saving for me at all, and because all my animations were based off linked image maps, I would lose all my animations I had configured. I reported a bug to that effect, and ended up throwing the linked image maps in script manually and just copied and pasted my animation data blocks into an unmanaged script file as well until the bug is resolved or I find out what I was doing wrong :)

The "nice" thing about having a few large images instead of lots of smaller ones is that it would cut down on a lot of wasted space in the level editor as now I've got a bunch of extra image maps taking up space in the toolbox. For example, I have one character with 8 animation sequences, each with 2 1024x1024 images, AND a linked image map combining the 2, so I have 24 imagemaps just for one character! Some way to suppress them or create your own toolbox sections or something - like one for each character - would help cut down on the clutter I had been hoping to avoid by using larger images.


-Andrew

#5 Sounds like your doing ISO animations? You know you can trim down to only five directions right? You can flip 3 of the directions to get all eight. Also remember you only need unique frames in your imageMaps. The animation datablock can be put together to reuse frames to form a fluid animation. I even repeat frames in a row to slow down certain parts of the animation sequence.

#6 You can only flip them if the character is symetrical. If the character isn't symetrical (because he's holding something, lighting is precalculated, or simply because the clothing isn't colored symetrically) you'll need all directions.

#7 Symmetry is pretty much needed, that is true. However, holding an item doesn't mean they need all eight directions. Most people will never even realize that the sprite is flipped and is now holding something in the left hand instead of the right. Games have been doing this for a very long time now. If you plan to have a lot of animation sequences, or a lot of animated objects, then I would hope you would make them symmetrical so that you can cut the art pipeline down. Otherwise, your artists will kill you.

#8 Just to be clear guys; this is an error being reported from the core TGE engine, specifically the PNG loader code, not the image-map code in TGB, it hasn't even got that far.

If it gets to the image-map, it'll can pack *any* sized image within the usual memory constraints.

I'm not sure why there's a limitation of that but I can check it out.

- Melv.