Lowering image ram memory thats being used from ipad to iPhone

games4fun

Hello,

So I have a universal app I'm making and all the graphics are made for rentia ipad and the project is also set for ipad as well. I just tried the app on a ipod touch 4 and its showing 100 mb for images in gamesalad viewer. Also when I test the app it closes after a few minutes when it reaches about 140mb total memory used. My question is what is everyone else doing to have there universal apps work on the ipads and also the iphones/iPod touches that use lots of image graphics since now Apple has made it a requirement to use rentia graphics. I would prefer to only have one project as well.

Thanks

The_Gamesalad_Guru

Socks

Unfortunately optimising your images won't have any effect on the size of the game in RAM, so if your game in RAM with unoptimized images is 140MB it will still be 140MB with optimized images.

The one way to guarantee smaller image files (in RAM) is to keep the file dimensions (in pixels) within the powers of 2 rule:

2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 . . . . etc etc

A file that is 129 x 129 pixels takes up 4 times as much memory as a file that is 128 x 128 pixels, trim a single pixel from each dimension and you lose 75% of its RAM footprint.

A file that is 1025 x 1025 pixels takes up 4 times as much memory as a file that is 1024 x 1024 pixels, trim a single pixel from each dimension and you lose 75% of its RAM footprint.

. . . etc

The_Gamesalad_Guru

Oops didn't pick up he was talking about ram..lol Still 140 shouldn't crash it that's well below crash perimeters. What version of GS are you using? 10.1 has a bad memory exe issue.

games4fun

Using Gamesalad 10.3
I am aware of the power of 2 and decreasing the image size so they don't use as much image ram. What I'm wondering is do we need to make 2 sets of images for universal apps or is there a easy way around this. Since Apple now requires us to have iPad rentia graphics and having just that one set only in the universal build for all iPod touches and iPhones is overkill.

Thanks

The_Gamesalad_Guru

Yep this is why I still make two versions for large scale games. Like our game Puck It we made two versions because we would never make the 50mb limit with a universal app. I would say though if you're crashing at 140mb you have an error in your code causing the crash. You won't get a memory crash until you approach over 170mb