• 2D

  • How to deal with high res sprites and tiles in tilsetes and animations?

Hey,

I'm currently doing the artwork for an isometric game for desktops. Since the assets are pre-rendered and not pixel art I'd like them to be in a higher resolution to have some detail.

For example: If I render my tiles in 256x256 there are already some details lost, so I'd like to have them in 512x512 or even bigger if possible. Would that cause the tilemaps getting to big?

And how should I go for animated sprites? For example: I rendered a spritesheet with a character walk animation (25 frames, 8 directions). A single sprite in that sheet has a resolution of 256x256 (again I'd rather have them in 512x512 or even bigger if possible), so the complete spritesheet has now a resolution of 6400x2048. This seems pretty big to me and it still contains only one animation. What size should a spritesheet for a desktop game be at maximum? 4096x4096?

How do you handle sprites and tiles with higher resolutions?

Thank you for any advice.

I think you should just do the math and see if the amount of memory you use match your hardware requirements/expectations. Eg: a 512x512 sprite, in 32-bit colors, is 1Mb of memory. If your video card has 1Gb memory, it can hold a maximum of 1000 such sprites. Possibly less as you're not going to have all the memory for them (you require some for rendering etc.) and also depending on implementations sometimes some memory is used for lower res (256x256, 128x128, etc.). A 6400x2048 is 6400 x 2048 x 4 -> about 52Mb. So it still fits within say, about 100Mb space all in all. Basically all your sprites will be, at some point, loaded in memory. If they don't fit into the video card RAM directly, expect a performance drag or maybe even a "it does not work at all".

What I'm saying is -> don't consider anything "big", just do the math, and check if that matches reasonable requirements. With modern hardware it's "reasonable" to expect 1Gb video RAM. But of course some devices have less than this...

Thank you for your answer. It's really helpful.