Build Progress Update
Hi everyone ^_^
Having realized I've been quiet for a few weeks, I thought I should just do a quick progress update. I'm also including a short poll, as there's something I can't fully make my mind up on and wanted to get some feedback.
To start, my apologies for the lack of updates, the last couple of weeks I've been dealing with some health issues (mostly better now), and some stress issues, which have slowed progress down. I'll hopefully have the monthly art poll for supporters out over the next couple of days.
Before the slow-down I'd been working on some new UI elements, covering; status bars, a quest tracker, a task tracker, an automation interface, and the new character avatar image system, all wrapped up in a new right sidebar. The status bars are animated, the quest tracker all works in-page (so updates without page changes), and I'm happy with how it's all turning out so far.
In terms of the avatar image system rework, I've had to do a lot of editing, sorting, and resizing on the files, including having to restart that process from half-way through due to some issues. The images are now fully edited other than the batch resizing, which is the matter I mentioned wanting to poll.
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How Much Should I Scale The Image Size For The Avatar System?
The avatar system at full-size currently has a file-size of about 160MB, over the previous one which is only about 5MB. The biggest issue here are outfits, which because each outfit has 18 different versions (3 body types, 3 chest sizes, and full/bust crops), resulting in each outfit adding about 8MB to the game size. This might not sound much, but it'll add up and I know some people like how lean the games download size is.
The current resolution of the parts are 1993x2993 for character bust parts, and 1993x6500 for full character parts, which is very big and would result in top high quality character images when put together. Even halved, this would still probably look great, as I generally resize images to a max of 600-700px height (so the halved bust would still be 1500px), but there is a quality loss.
Perhaps more in general, would there be an interest in a version of the game that was larger file size but had the higher quality original images in it?
So, what do you all think?
1/ Keep the full avatar image size.
2/ Reduce the avatar image size a little (down to 75%)
3/ Reduce the avatar image size reasonably (down to 50%)
4/ Really shrink that file size (down to 35%)
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Think that's the general state of play currently. Fingers crossed I should have an alpha version ready soon, and then before long the full 0.6.0 build.
Thank you for your time reading this, and happy gaming ^_^
Comments (4)
Why not use .svg files instead?
Hi Null ^_^ Apologies, I only just saw your question. I'll take another look at .svg files, but not sure if it's the best file format for the job. Part of the problem is that I convert the Twine/HTML files to the Android APK files, and I'm not sure if the conversion will allow .svg files to work with that conversation process.
I have no idea what any of this means or how it affects the game, it all literally sounds like gibberish to me. Personally, just do whatever you think is best. If that means shrinking down the file size or whatever by 50% or whatever, then go right ahead. Though from the look of the polls, it seems like people really want you to keep it as is, so maybe just do that. I don't know.
Hi Andrew ^_^ Don't worry, it is all a bit technical. It's mostly that I've been shrinking down images for years and wanted to check in if that's really what people wanted, which it seems I was wrong on. Seeing as shrinking them down is extra effort and people don't want that, I'll probably test out using full-size images and see how it goes :)