I've been wanting to make a game with high-resolution graphics in MMF2 for a while now.
I'm thinking of designing the graphics in Illustrator, animating them in Flash, and then importing them into MMF2.
Here's a sample of my graphics so far. I'm going for a Paper Mario-like feel.
The image below was my original concept art for the game. Part of the reason why I want to make the game with high-res graphics is because I feel that it can more effectively capture the feel of this picture. (You can click on it to enlarge)
MMF2 is good for many things, but vector art is not one of them. MMF2 compresses and displays all images as pixel arrays, ie bmp/jpeg/png/etc, not vector graphics. Hence that very enormous boy sprite would take up a great deal of memory and have slow rotations and pixel shader effects in HWA- it would operate as a single texture on a graphics card.
Anything can be high resolution, but having large textures basically sinks you into vector graphics- which has been largely passed over for 3D renderers outside of web applications. So you *can* have large sprites, but they may bog down your performance.
Actually, I was planning to shrink down that sprite significantly for the actual game. All the animations would be handled as bitmaps, so I would animate each of the individual parts in Flash, then import all the parts put together into MMF as a single (much smaller) image.
Well that works plenty fine. GPU's will rarely have a problem with anything below 256x256 in fair numbers, and at smaller sizes you can fit a lot on screen at once. Just make sure you use the HWA version of MMF2, if your game is graphically inclined
Originally Posted by Pixelthief Well that works plenty fine. GPU's will rarely have a problem with anything below 256x256 in fair numbers, and at smaller sizes you can fit a lot on screen at once. Just make sure you use the HWA version of MMF2, if your game is graphically inclined
If a large object is operating as "a single texture" about 99.999% of common GPUs should be able to handle 256x256 effortlessly, no? I would assume that with HWA you could handle much larger objects with ease with most home-user gpus.
My advice is to try it, do not dismiss what HWA can do until you have tested what you can get away with .
As Gamsester has already mentioned, 256 x 256 textures should be no trouble for even the typical consumer type graphics card. On the game I am developing we have over 400 mb on screen (number from the debugger,k and most of that is sprites), 256x256 texxtures would be small in comparison to what we are using, and MMF is still running at about 100 FPS (on a decent PC mind...). We only use simple shaders, so perhaps that is why we are getting away with so much .
Needless to say I am thankful I made the move to HWA!