Photics — Cool Tip #7 — GameSalad Already Optimizes Images

PhoticsPhotics Member Posts: 4,172
edited November -1 in Working with GS (Mac)
I realize that many of you might not have read through the many pages of the "" thread. But on page six, there's some important information that you might have missed...

http://gamesalad.com/forums/topic.php?id=15896&page=6

Basically... if you're using programs like ImageOptim to compress images, you're not really doing much to improve the performance of your game.

One of the weaknesses of GameSalad is loading times. So, you might be thinking that compressing your images with PNG optimizers might be improving the loading times. Well, that's why GameSalad does it for you.

If you're looking to save hard drive space on your computer, by making the project smaller, OK. If you think you're speeding up your game, then you might want to run the following test...

1 - Don't compress a PNG file
2 - Publish the file
3 - Open the file you get from GameSalad (Right-Click and show package contents)
4 - Try compressing the PNG files in the image folder.

If you have lots of little images, this isn't a problem. But since BOT is going to have roughly 250 MB of images, I decided to check it out. I realized that ImageOptim was a waste of time for GameSalad. For other projects, like uploading images to a website, I think ImageOptim is great. But for GameSalad, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference.

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Now, this is a tip for the GameSalad team...

I think the images should be optimized when they're placed into GameSalad. Why? It's because it doesn't make sense to compress assets every time I want to test the game on my iPhone. It should only be done once.

Comments

  • SkyMapleSkyMaple Member Posts: 817
    Nice tip! One thing, do you delete the image and keep the zip?

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  • mynameisacemynameisace Hull, UKMember Posts: 2,484
    I would still run through image optimization programs, GS is basically making the images iOS PNG compatible which means that it changes the colour bytes to the iOS preferred method. This is something that XCode also does when the app is built. If it is not iOS compatible or if it was a JPEG for example, the app would convert the images at run-time every time you opened the app instead of when it is built.

    Running images through an image optimization program with get rid of unnecessary artifacts and therefor still make a difference to the images within GS and your apps.

    Ace
  • PhoticsPhotics Member Posts: 4,172
    SkyMaple said:
    Nice tip! One thing, do you delete the image and keep the zip?

    I'm not deleting any GameSalad project images. I just stopped compressing them. GameSalad is doing it for me.

    To save hard drive space on my computer, I do delete the PNG after importing it into GameSalad. A copy then exists in the GameSalad project. If I need to make a change, I can go into the project and pull out the image... or I can go back to the original Pixelmator file. I don't see the sense in keeping the image twice.
    mynameisace said:
    Running images through an image optimization program with get rid of unnecessary artifacts and therefor still make a difference to the images within GS and your apps.

    I'm not seeing that. I'm thinking GameSalad does a better job at compressing the PNG files than ImageOptim, which just gave me a bunch of X's when I tried optimizing the images from an older project.
  • Rob2Rob2 Member Posts: 2,402
    @Photics the Xs you see are because the file can not be compressed further (with current settings).

    GS uses pngcrush the same tool that is used by both Xcode and ImageOptim but ImageOptim uses a bunch of other recursive methods and tools as well to get every last bit squished out.:)
  • PhoticsPhotics Member Posts: 4,172
    Rob2 said:
    @Photics the Xs you see are because the file can not be compressed further (with current settings).

    That's the point of the test. :)
    When I wrote "X's", I also mean 0.0% compression.

    For developers...
    If the image can't be compressed further, then why bother with ImageOptim?

    For the GameSalad team...
    Why is the same image being compressed every time the game is tested / published?
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