How well will a Windows Phone 7 XNA game handle large textures, approximately 8000 x 4000 pixels with lots of colours. For the background to my game I have the choice between making some sort of background streaming system to load small textures when they are needed or to load the background as one massive texture.
Will the phone struggle with this or will I be much better off loading and unloading smaller textures into memory when needed?
Also any format suggestions for these textures?
I believe individual texture size you can have on a WP7 XNA application is 2048x2048. So that will be your largest texture to work with.
From my experience it's best to go with several sprite sheets, separated by their contents or whatever makes sense. I use several ranging from 512x512 to 1536x1024.
Limit of 2048 for initializing a texture listed in MSDN here
I haven't tried XNA with a windows 7 phone myself but I found this article that I think could answer your question
here.
Good Luck with your game
Related
I wish to compress my png sprite textures a bit so they don't take up that much memory as I build for mobile devices. As I use a lot of gif animations this is crucial for my game's performance.
I looked for an answer but the threads I found were more than 1 year old and not about sprites so I figured I ask my version. An image that's 224 KB in size takes up 1.6 MB in Unity with the generate mip maps turned off
So compressing the png sprite textures in my game. How to do that?
Try setting Format to Automatic Compressed.
For this to work on all mobile platforms make sure the initial image has sizes that are power of 2 (actually I think that multiple of 4 should be enough, but just to be on the safe side).
This will lower the quality of the image but should save you some space.
Turning mip map off is again a good idea as mim map increase the size of the image by about 33%.
And one more thing, make sure that Non Power of 2 is set to None, that may be the reason you see an increase in size at the moment.
Todays displays have a quite huge range in size and resolution. For example, my 34.5cm × 19.5cm display (resulting in a diagonal of 39.6cm or 15.6") has 1366 × 768 pixels, whereas the MacBook Pro (3rd generation) with a 15" diagonal has 2880×1800 pixels.
Multiple people complained that everything is too small with such high resolution displays (see example). That is simple to explain when developers use pixels to define their GUI. For "traditional displays", this is not a big problem as the pixels might have about the same size on most monitors. But on the new monitors with much higher pixel density the pixels are simply smaller.
So how can / should user interface developers deal with that problem? Is it possible to get the physical size of the screen? Is it possible to set physical sizes instead of pixel-based ones? Is that still a problem (it's been a while since I last read about it) or was that fixed meanwhile?
(While css seems to support cm, when I try here it, it is not the set size).
how can / should user interface developers deal with that problem?
Use a toolkit or framework that support resolution independence. WPF is built from the ground up to be resolution-independent, but even old framework like Windows Forms can learn new tricks. OSX/iOS and Windows (or browser if we're talking about web) itself may try to take care the problem by automatic scaling, but if there's bitmap graphic involved, developers might need to provide different bitmaps such in Android (which face most varying resolution and densities compared to other OS)
Is it possible to get the physical size of the screen?
No, and developers shouldn't care about it. Developers should only care about the class of the device (say, different UI for tablet and smartphone), and perhaps the DPI to decide which bitmap resource to use. Vector resource and font should be scaled by the framework.
Is that still a problem (it's been a while since I last read about it) or was that fixed meanwhile?
Depend on when you last read about it. Windows support is still spotty, even for the internal apps itself, and while anyone developing in WPF or UWP have it easy, don't expect major third party apps to join soon. OSX display scaling seems to work a bit better, while modern mobile OS are either running on limited range of resolution (iOS and Windows Phone) or handle every resolution imaginable quite nicely (Android)
There are a few ways to deal with different screen sizes, for example when I make mobile apps in java, I either use DIP(Density Independent Pixels; They stay at a fixed size) or make objects occupy a percentage of the screen with simple math. As for web development, you can use VW and VH (Viewport Width and Viewport Height), by adding these to the end of a value instead of px, the objects take up a percentage of the viewport. For example 100vh takes 100% of the viewport height. Then what I think is the best way to do it, but time consuming, is to use a library like Bootstrap that automatically resizes elements, even when the window is resized. W3Schools has a good tutorial on bootstrap and more detailed explainations on any of these options can be looked up with an easy google search.
The design of the GUI in today display diversity era is real challenge. I would suggest several hints, mainly about the GUI applications design:
Never set or expect constant pixel size of the text - the user can change it from the system settings of the OS. Use some real-world measures for the text and check its pixel size when drawing. Provide some way to put the random size text in the boundaries of the window.
Never set or expect constant pixel size of the GUI widgets. Try to position them on the window in some adaptive way - according to the size of the window. Most GUI widget toolkits today have such instruments.
Never set or expect constant pixel size dialog windows. Let the OS to choose the size for you and then use what you get (X). Or, if you need to set some size and position (Windows), define it as a percent of the screen size.
If possible use scalable image formats for the icons. SVG is great for icons actually. Using sets of bitmap icons with different sizes is acceptable, but highly non-optimal as memory use and still will not provide perfect scaling in most cases.
At work, I work with very large images.
I currently do my rendering via SDL2.
The max texture size on the graphics card my machine uses is 8192x8192.
Because my data sets are larger than what will fit in a single texture, I split my image into multiple textures after it is loaded, and tile them.
However, I have found that this comes at a very steep cost. Rendering only 4 textures around 5K by 5K (pixels) each completely tanks the framerate!
Conventional wisdom tells me that the fewer texture swaps the better, but with such large images I've found myself between a rock and a hard place.
One thing I've considered is that perhaps if I were to chunck the images up into many small textures, I could take advantage of culling which would hopefully be a net win. But there's a big problem with that approach - I need to be able to zoom out.
Another option would be to down scale the images. This seems promising as the analysis I am doing on the images do not require the high resolution that the images provide.
I know that OpenGL has mipmapping, but I am inexperienced with OpenGL and am weary of diving into it for a work project. I am not aware of a good way to downscale the images within the confines of SDL2, and for reasons specific to the work I am doing, scaling the images down offline (before I load them) is not appealing.
What is the best approach for me to get the highest framerate in this situation?
I have two modes to continue programming a hexagonal map in this moment, and I don't know what way is better. Maybe you can help me :)
I used a texture to represent the "grid", so the squad with this texture is static and don't move or edit in runtime.
In the first hand, I have a texture with 7700x6736 pixles, however, his size it's only 3.131KB, when I run in a random engine (Unity in this case) the frame rate it's nice (constants 60fps with VSynk and +100 without VSynk)
This texture is associated in one transparent material to the squad (2 triangles)
With the second mode, I have a 14 textures to 550x496 pixels and 21KB. But with this mode, I need 14 squads (28 triangles against 2) and 14 materials with differents textures, against 1 in the other way.
Too, with this second mode, I need asking the distance of every squad to hide or not hide (a simple occlusion culling)
What is the better way in your opinion?
While your 7k texture works on your dev machine it may be not supported in some of the platforms you'll target. I'd use a 2048^2 as a safe maximum, or even a 1024^2.
The second problem is that it may use 3MB as a JPG/PNG compressed file, but in your video memory it will be as an uncompressed one (unless you use some texture-specific compression, but you may have problems with platform support again).
Additionally - you should consider if you really need the Non Power Of Two textures, officially they should be supported ATM, but you can still get into problems on some older hardware.
In general your solution depends on the platforms that you want to target, and especially if you plan to target mobile devices (and which ones).
(Sorry if I missed the answer)
So I just started out making an XNA game for windows.
And while designing the UI, I was wondering how to scale the UI at different resolutions.
So, imagine that I make a UI for a 1920*1080 screen, how do I make sure this is displayed correctly on a smaller 4*3 screen?
Thanks in advance!
Simon.
Usually one designs the GUI in a way that will be usable in the lowest resolution your game offers (traditionally 800x600), then you are sure everything fits correctly at all resolutions.
This is usually why games at higher resolutions seem to have a lot more space for the "playfield" and less for UI than at smaller resolutions.
You could scale the UI once the resolution is higher as well, as easy as using the scale parameter on SpriteBatch.Draw, or you could do it a bit more smartly, by having your assets 9-sliced and aligned to WIDTH/HEIGHT constant percentages.