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[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.

[medieval]

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.

[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.

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.

I don't know why I do it to myself, but I think I enjoy it.. 
I also like the concept of a tile-less game, and painting is sort of what I want to do, so it's a win/win, since the whole game is like one big piece of conceptart 

[moi]

Good luck anywyay, that's great art.

[Hideous]

What you could do is load the images dynamically, so that closer windows are already loaded, and others are loaded as you walk towards them. Right?

[Dacke]

What you could do is load the images dynamically, so that closer windows are already loaded, and others are loaded as you walk towards them. Right?

Yes. Using multi-threading. In C++.
If I was using Java I wouldn't even think twice about it.

The loading time for images this size is quite long, too. I wouldn't be able to guarantee that all the images were loaded in time, if loading them dynamically.

But if I continue to build on this engine after the end of the project, multi-threading it will be one of the top things on my to-do list.

[Dacke]

I've spent the last two days trying to make the textures load dynamically, using multiple threads. I have threads up and running but OpenGL is giving me some grief. I have failed to find anything substantial on the intratubes about OpenGL's internal texture management and stuff. If anyone knows anything about textures in OpenGL, I would really appreciate some *pointers!

[alexandersshen]

This game looks extremely promising.  I think my computer crashed from me just reading this post.

Best of luck to you guys!  Can't wait to play it.

[agj]

You should probably hit the Technical forum, for maximum exposure.

[eddietree]

Conceptart dump-post!

What's going on between the legs?

[pen]

it's a tentacle

My scanner isn't in my room, so I can't show you the original illustration (markers and pencil), where the point gets across much more easily.

[Dacke]

it's a tentacle

My scanner isn't in my room, so I can't show you the original illustration (markers and pencil), where the point gets across much more easily.

Seeing how fantastic the original tentacle is, you should scan and post it tomorrow!