Stingy with Images...

[Xino]

OK! So I want to do A LOT of pictures for my game. But I don't want to make so many the game will take forever to download. So here is my question, can I use one image in a comic like format but display separate panels only? I want to use one image file to show 3 different scenes.

EXAMPLE!


We start with panel 1, give a little dialog and then fade to panel 2. I'd also like to display panel 3 without removing 2 from the screen. Is this possible?

[PyTom]

The easiest way to do this would be to declare multiple images, and show them one at a time, at appropriate positions. You can set the position by declaring an image using Image, and giving it an xpos parameter.

Code: Select all

image panel1 = Image("panel1.jpg", xpos=0)
image panel2 = Image("panel2.jpg", xpos=250)
image panel3 = Image("panel3.jpg", xpos=500)

You can then show each images when appropriate. Just be sure to put a "scene black" behind them.

Code: Select all

label start:
    scene black
    show panel1

    "I am threatening you!"

    show panel2

    "Now we glare at each other."

    show panel3

    "And we get ready to fight!"

[killdream]

Not that joining it all in a single image would help much. It is a issue when you're doing web development, as each archive has 2 requests, so you'd want the number of files to minimum. In a stand-alone game, you'll distribute just a single zip (or installer), in the end, pixels in a image will be as heavy as pixels in separated images.

Try looking at JPEGs quality property (when exporting, a value of 80% should be satisfactory in most of cases, altough it'll have some artifacts, or alot of them, depending on the image). Reducing the image size and the number of colors help too.

Anyways, there was a survey here where most peoples voted to don't mind really the download size, as long as the game appealed for them. Just do what you want to do, and if you think it's a bit too much, you can cut some scenes or so.