Maximum Image Size (When using Andorra 2D, ... or any other, might be gpu limitation)

[Daikrys]

making a texture bigger then the screen solution is okay cause scaling down provide still a good quality
and if you have not much of this big images it would also render nice on youre laptop

Or should I use a 512x512 resolution for my game...and strech it to 640x480 ... but that would look really bad no?

yeah never do this, stick to normal screen solutions, its also helpful if you use fullscreen

[robert83]

Oh sorry , I do use full screen, right now 640x480 is enough for my pixel needs...

so you are telling me if I'm planing to use like 20-30 hand drawn background images... I can go with 640x480 resolution for the PNG file as well ? (and need not overcomplicate it by choping etc...)

Rob

[User137]

512x512 texture scaled up to 640x480 screen will look just fine, possibly with bi-linear filtering. Just remember that the big image is just the background. Draw your menu buttons, frames, fonts and all the sharp stuff on top of it.

Make sure you do the downscaling properly with good image software. Something like free Gimp can do it well. Have the real 640x480 background saved separately and scale it for texture image down to 512x512.

Also what you need to do is not having all 30 background pictures loaded to your program same time. Have 1-3 texture slots for backgrounds and load them from the disk (not per-frame but when screens change).

[robert83]

Thank you everyone,

Sorry that some of them questions might seem dumb for you, but I'm just starting and trying to make it right ... you are right, I will not need to load all them images for background at once... and meanwhile I've also realized something, some of my animations...need not be (well I think none of them) in 16bit , probably will seem stupid but I just realized my Moon animation, only needs 4bit instead of 16bit, I did not know that 4 bit can hold any kind of four colors (for example 4 shades of yellow) ...

Thank you again!!!

Rob

[User137]

I know nothing about Andorra... but images on disk can be compressed as small as you can. When loaded to graphics card memory they are converted to 24 or 32bit. That depends if you use alpha channel or not, meaning each of R,G,B,A will take 8 bits in order to be byte-aligned. So it's usually quite safe to use full color textures nowadays, unless you go for advanced optimizing things. Just know that even if the image is just 4 bit in drawing software, it may be much larger when loaded in game.