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[mirosurabu]

I'll second Melly. I wish I could draw like that.

Keep up the good work.

[pen]

Man that looks creepy-awesome.

Thanks!
Now there's just some 100.000*100.000 pixels left to design and paint, without tilesets... Then All I need to do is make the monsters, main character and item effects... I'm as big a loon as Dacke I tells ya!

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@mirosurabu: Keep at it, draw in your spare time and in time you'll surprise yourself with what you can do!

[narasu]

That tree-man looks awesomely disturbing.

[Rory]

I the first one! That tree is pretty creepy as well.
I really like the art style you guys are employing, very... Okami-like springs to mind, but I'm not sure if that's what I really mean. It's awesome.

[Dacke]

Thanks everyone!

Time for a small update on the engine:

Most of my time has been spent on battling the horrible language known as C++ and exploring the strange secrets of OpenGL.

But I have gotten lots of programming done and designed some really sweet algorithms. I'm pretty confident that moving objects can't end up inside walls! Even when moving super fast!

The loading of the tiles for the levels (directly from image files) is also working like a charm. It's like jumping around in the image.

But now I need some advice:

We use huge textures for the level graphics. Currently I'm keeping all used textures in the primary memory from the start of the game. This solution will require lots and lots of RAM. I could, of cource, load the textures as they are needed. To avoid loading times I would have to multithread in C++ and simply put: I don't wanna!

What I would like to know is:
How much RAM may our game use when running on your computer?

[Synnah]

What I would like to know is:
How much RAM may our game use when running on your computer?

2GB! I have 4GB, which is far too much, and I rarely use more than 1GB at any one time.

More sensibly, if you look at Firefox, it will generally use about 150MB, and that's for a program that's designed to be run at the same time as lots of other things. You can probably get away with allocating 256MB on most peoples' PCs (There can't be many people with less than 512MB of RAM these days, can there?). How much do you reckon you'd need?

[Cray]

How did I miss this thread before? That's some pretty damn sweet concept art pen, which I'm like the 10th person saying

Dacke, hmm. I've only got 512mb total on this computer, but I'm probably well in the minority if it'll make a big difference in how well the game plays

[Dacke]

Thanks, that's good to know! I think we'll try to keep memory usage bellow 300MB, but it won't be easy. I might even have to sacrifice some of my grander parallaxing plans. Or is 300MB is too much?

Using ~200MB for the level textures we'll get levels that have an area of 100 million pixels (~212 windows). For each 8MB of memory we can increase the level size with 4 million pixels (~8 windows).

To show you what each window will bring you, here is a screenshot from the current version of the game.
Note that the character is just a placeholder, the foreground is not there yet, the background is not in place and the terrain isn't even finished (pen tells me). But I'm posting it anyway! (Just don't tell pen.)

[Synnah]

I think we'll try to keep memory usage bellow 300MB, but it won't be easy. I might even have to sacrifice some of my grander parallaxing plans. Or is 300MB is too much?

I want parallax! Would it be easy to create two executables, one for low-end systems which uses ~200MB, and doesn't use any background layers (Perhaps just use a non-moving gradient for the sky), and a high-end version which does, and uses about 500MB? Anyone with more than 512MB of RAM should be able to run the latter.

By the way, the background art is looking amazing.

[moi]

300 MB seems a bit much, what are you doing with those graphics? Have you painted the whole level as one block? What format do you use for the graphics?

[pen]

300 MB seems a bit much, what are you doing with those graphics? Have you painted the whole level as one block? What format do you use for the graphics?

Right now the whole level is painted (no tilesets), in blocks of 2048^2pixels. The blocks currently consists of 2~ layers, the background layer(ground included), and a foreground layer in front of the player. We will probably use parallaxing, not sure yet though.


By the way, the first block took me 6 hours to do, but the more I paint, the more material I have that I can copypaste&redraw on, so with a little luck we might just be able to make a tech&art demo until the 27th, with at least 3-5 minutes of playtime 

Here is the first level in the resolution I'm working with (4096^2px)
http://www.erikronnblom.com/forumimages/techdemo_bana_big.jpg

edit: Oh, and we're using .png, mainly because we need transparency, but we also need loads of colours.

[Hideous]

Wait, so both of you are Swedish? No wonder this sounds amazing.

[agj]

Wow, this game is looking so... superlative.

For the record, I have 1 GB of RAM in this computer.

[narasu]

Task manager tells me I have 1GB of memory, but really I think I only have 512MB.

[moi]

300 MB seems a bit much, what are you doing with those graphics? Have you painted the whole level as one block? What format do you use for the graphics?

Right now the whole level is painted (no tilesets), in blocks of 2048^2pixels. The blocks currently consists of 2~ layers, the background layer(ground included), and a foreground layer in front of the player. We will probably use parallaxing, not sure yet though.


By the way, the first block took me 6 hours to do, but the more I paint, the more material I have that I can copypaste&redraw on, so with a little luck we might just be able to make a tech&art demo until the 27th, with at least 3-5 minutes of playtime 

Here is the first level in the resolution I'm working with (4096^2px)
http://www.erikronnblom.com/forumimages/techdemo_bana_big.jpg

edit: Oh, and we're using .png, mainly because we need transparency, but we also need loads of colours.

Unless you really want to go the route of the "whole level is a painting" I think there might be tricks that you could use to avoid doing that. For example instead of using "tiles" per se you could use blocks with bigger graphics (trees or something like that)
The advantage of using tiles for graphics is not only to reduce size but also to make it so that the game is finisheable without having to do a titan work.