What makes the application bigger?

[FlinkGigitty]

I have actually been wondering about how I can decrease the size of the applications I make. Im fully aware that I use more "realistic"-ish images than many of the small games here, but I wanna know if maybe I can decrease it a little anyway - and perhaps what to prio if my application is too big. Images I use are PNG format, music format is Ogg. My images often have animation frames with 3-20 frames. Does the size have something to do with the images' actually size as png formats? And same with music?

[method72]

well if you are using a lotta actives and each one has one or more images in it for an animation.. that can add to the size quickly.

you can use the application wide option to compress the binary and sounds.. that usually compresses the .exe down quite a bit.

if you don't mind losing a small bit of quality you can search the internet for some image and sound compression tools.. my largest .exe has been around 125mb (after being compressed) personally i dont think that is very large.. but i guess it all depends on what your working on.

regards.

[LB]

You can optimize it too by going into the app properties and editing the sound and images filters and turning off automatic and unchecking the ones you don't use.

[JoKa]

Do I remember right, does MMF use BMP format internally to store gfx? I load some large background screens as Active Picture. The optimized gfx files use less space than including them directly as Background Objects.

MMFs wav compression is very good. Using ogg doesn't make much difference. I reduce all larger wavs to the lowest acceptable quality. Even a format like 22,050kHz 16Bit Mono can return good results.

[method72]

i haven't tested this my self..
but if you create an array, day 1-dimension of 100 elements, but you only use 10 of them.. can reducing the size of the array reduce the .exe?

Or is the array component allocated in RAM, therefore reserving a 1000000 element array will only chew up ram and add to the physical array file size, but not the .exe?

[LB]

Yeah it's a memory thing, not a file size thing.

[Shawn]

Also, in regards to sounds, you can play with the bitrate of your .ogg files if you have a sound editing program. I use GoldWave, but it is shareware, not freeware. You can usually shave sounds down a bit without sacrificing a whole lot of audio quality. Unless you're extremely picky about your sounds.