Problem with background image size for my game

[Koji_Kabuto]

Hello everyone and I hope all the experts on memory that can handle an app on the devices can help me. The problem is: I am doing a version of my game Mazinger, I have a scroll level that has a size of 3200 pixels * 768 pixels and background I have a picture that I show below, and several characters when together are running on Windows, I reported about 37 elements and a use of 120 MB (that iOS handles other measure), then when you run on the iPad 1 or iPhone 4 does not work, now if I delete the background that is a PNG of 3200 pixels * 686 pixels, works on iPhone 4 but not in the iPhone 1, I assume that these are memory problems.

Now I have two educational apps and consumer is between 150 MB and 160MB, the two work perfectly on the iPad. Then assume first that the problem is the size of the background, because the loads it displays it in black but as you'll see in the picture you post. The other and there is consultation, is that I cut the image into parts? At least 3 and tied for the level? or are problems with the scroll? or am I in the presence of a bug? All this because there is no point in the other apps load many images of 1024 pixels * 768 pixels with full quality and not suffer the iPad.

We greatly appreciate your help on this,

[Keith]

Wow, that's quite a large background image and it's no surprise that it doesn't work on the 256 MB devices. You'd be best to break that up into small pieces and reuse them. It shouldn't be too hard do that. In looking at the image I see a sand dune, a ship, some rocks and of course the foreground fog. The best part about breaking it up is that you could make your map even longer and put the elements on layers and set the X speed of the layer to create a nice parallax effect. I'm pretty aggressive about using hi-res graphics in my apps, but I wouldn't ever go beyond a 960x640 screen. One approach you could do if the above isn't helpful is simply make the image half the resolution and scale it up, but so much ca be gained from breaking it up and parallaxing it.

[Koji_Kabuto]

Thanks Keith for your advice and know that cutting the image into 5 parts of 640 pixels*686 pixels and it works on iPhone 4, with 16 robots onscreen at once. Of course in the iPad 1 did not work, as it has less memory, lower than 16 robots and robots to 4 does not work, I will try two. This is to do with how I can have to make a game with good graphics for devices with at least 256 MB or higher. The parallax scrolling of the layers, I have to test its performance. Greetings and thanks for answering!