keeping an MFA as small as possible?

[Aloan]

say I have a "game" with 10 pictures in it which were inserted as a background or active and the pictures themselves were all imported .pngs. Will my "game" have a larger .mfa versus if I had converted the imported pictures to a smaller file size .jpg prior to inserting it into MMF2 and saving the .mfa? (just trying to keep my mfa as small as possible)

[James]

No.

[Dynasoft]

To clarify, MMF uncompresses anything you import, and recompresses (losslessly) into its own format.

You may be able to get a smaller filesize (both .mfa and final .exe) by storing the images externally in whatever format (png would be best for lossless) and loading them with events. But it would come at the cost of startup time for your game, as you'd have to wait for each image to be loaded.

EDIT: to clarify even more, some of the runtime exporters do use "external" .png images, so any efforts to reduce filesize using external images would be pointless in that case.

[Aloan]

Got it! thanks. Everything within the mfa is mfa's proprietary Ones and Zeroes, no matter what. It's at it's own format, I see! Great to know so I don't loose time changing all the dozens of real digital photographs to another format thinking it would make a smaller mfa! In my case I might consider externability, since I'm spreading a certain amount of pictures to it's own levels. I believe, external load will do the trick nicely.