Keeping resources external.

[keokeo]

"Keeping resources external makes even content-
packed games have small exes that load pretty much instantly."


I recently came across this sentence somewhere on the net, I don't remember where.


Does that mean that the game will only load the files that are visible at any time on screen, thus making the game run much faster? I am looking for such ways to conserve memory and cpu power in order to build, bigger, more complex levels.

Could someone please explain briefly how this can be achieved?

[Chaos]

I think they mean keeping all music files, graphics, sound effects, any media you can, separate from the .EXE - while you can pretty easily get away with keeping music and some sound effects external, some graphics used for say, player characters and enemies are more of a challenge.

Backgrounds however, can be loaded externally by essentially creating a level editor and using MMF's paste to backdrop function. I'm pretty sure there are a few tutorials on that floating around.

[Jacob]

Yep, Nifflas' level editor does that exactly. You can get it from here http://nifflas.ni2.se/?page=Multimedia+Fusion+2

You could use the animated picture object with a behavior, in theory, to get sprites moving.

[keokeo]

some graphics used for say, player characters and enemies are more of a challenge.

In theory apart from the main character who is always visible on screen, for all the rest I could use simple, invisible, low-memory, placeholder graphics for all the collisions and such, and load the final visible, memory-heavy graphics and animations only for as long as they appear on screen. If the player moves away, they disappear. Is that possible?

I was experimenting with this yesterday. For example I tried to load, upon certain input (click of a button),a large PNG image for an active object and then have it re-load something small in place of the larger one. It works to some extent but is not very precise, in that when the large graphic is removed and only the placeholder remains the memory doesn't go back to the exact number it was before. It does decrease, but always completely. Is there a more sophisticated way of doing that?