I just looked at Elf World's size, and I found out it's 77 Mega bytes. I've compressed it using Tug Zip, and it's now 28 MBs. Is there anything else I can do to compress it? It's only 16 levels long so far, and I haven't even added the bonus stuff yet.
Fine Garbage since 2003.
CURRENT PROJECT:
-Paying off a massive amount of debt in college loans.
-Working in television.
77MB? The only thing that I can think of that would put it up to that size is large detailed animated objects, or a whole lot of high-bitrate MP3 music/sound. Either way, it looks like you'll need to optimise.
Someone remind me to add more stuff to that article one day...
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
Dunno whether it'll help, but I've found making an all-in-one exe (so the dlls are all built in, so it's entirely standalone) is a great way of compressing stuff.
I made a simple app containing one big PNG file, and the end result was a 1mb exe, a 200kb png file and a 270kb dll. A total of 1.5mb, too big for the intended floppy diskette.
So I tried putting it in a project and building the project as totally standalone (no installer, no dlls, no external files), and the exe it generated (which included dll, png and exe) was 900kb. Not even a megabyte.
Dunno how well it does with sounds, but I was pretty impressed with that! Even left me enough room on the floppy to add a readme and a nice 24-bit XP icon for my app.
Another trick you could pull off is save all external files on your webserver in zips, then get them to download an installer. The installer asks them 'do you want to download the game all in one go (broadband users)? Or do you want to download it in sections (dialup/snailband users)?'
If they choose option 1, the app downloads all the files before running the game.
If they choose option 2, the app downloads and extracts the files in the order they're needed in the game, and stays connected while the user plays. So it's downloading the next level as they play the current one.
This would need the game to be able to check the presence of external files (so it wouldn't advance to the next level until all the necessary files were downloaded).
Of course, that only works if you've got EXTERNAL files. If your game's just a massive 77mb cca file, then you got a problem. External files are so much sweeter!
The only thing extrenal I did use was a photoshop image for the title screen. But I'm going to dump that, because it doesn't look very good.
I would like to have 3d rendered graphics, but it looks as if that would make it worse... I'm limited as far as MMF extensions...I only have MMF 1.2... The only extension I'm using is the Scrollbar object...and a few transtions.
Fine Garbage since 2003.
CURRENT PROJECT:
-Paying off a massive amount of debt in college loans.
-Working in television.
The one time, i came that close, was when i had used about 10 wave files for background music.
But then i didn't knew the wave files were so BIG. It was before the internet and i should have actually fitted on a floppy disk. Unfortunately the HardDisk crashed and the games was lost, just as the very first version of my game.
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