Chatting with fprefect111 about loading all resources externally (See 'Death by a Thousand Tweaks') got me thinking about what I've learned so far in the three months or so I've been working on this game.
Looking back at my old versions (You DO keep a folder for all of your old source code save versions don't you?) I noticed that my gmk file was growing by leaps and bounds there at first.Add an mp3 or two. Some animated fonts. Fullscreen backgrounds. All of a sudden it was 5 megs. And Game Maker is not very efficient in this area either. I added a 140kb jpg background, and when I saved the new gmk file, it jumped up by over a full megabyte! WTH??So at that point I started to think long term instead of short term, and switched over to pre-loading all my big sprites, backgrounds, music, etc.My gmk weighs in at 1.3 megs right now, but I know I could slim it down more if I tried.But I do hate diets…
1.3 megs is pretty good. My games always start out super small, just a couple hundred kb, then I add a sound file and it explodes >_>
Keep resources external =)
Why does a GM file grow that much if you add a 140kb file to the project? Does it convert it to BMP, of is it prepared to render everything in a hologram yet? I can't remember GM6 made such big files.
Yeah, when you load images onto GameMaker they're all stored in the same format, as opposed to remembering that each one's a .jpg or a .png or whatever. Which format it is I have no idea, but the compression's not all that swell if you've got big images with lots of colors.
That's why you wanna keep anything bigger than 100*100 or so saved externally as a .jpg :)Why use MP3s? Use a DLL and use some chiptunes or OGGs
As for images, always remember that procedural drawing can save on memory usageMy games usually end around 1MB, in fact they were all less than 1MB (zipped) until KiboshMy game uses oggs. WAVs are massive, and MP3s don't loop properly.
Yeah, use ogg. due to their awesomeness.