Max app size
Hello,
Is there a max size of the app, which Apple will accept? I'm asking because only intro in my game has about 500 MB, so I think that all game will have about 2 GB :-) And this is only first episode...
Is there a max size of the app, which Apple will accept? I'm asking because only intro in my game has about 500 MB, so I think that all game will have about 2 GB :-) And this is only first episode...
Comments
20GB is larger than some iPhone and iPod's total capacity isn't it?
@marcinmakaj, Are you sure is already 500 MB??
@artonskyblue, yes, I mean file project has 500 MB, because Intro contains about 2000 frames.
Email: artonskyblue(@)gmail(dot)com
But maybe some would.
And yes, on the ATT 3G network, you are limited to 20 MB.
The largest that can be downloaded via a carrier and not Wi Fi is currently 20 MB as has already been stated.
Cyan is currently working on Riven, the sequel to MYST, and apparently it is going to weigh in at 1.5GB - which will make it the largest iPhone game created so far. It requires 2GB free just to install it properly.
MYST was another biggie at 700MB.
However, all that being said, I am very surprised that you able to have a game that large running ok in GameSalad.
Have you tested it on an actual device yet?
On an older device, the device will crash when the RAM usage nears ~45MB
That number includes the engine requirements as well, not just images and sounds.
On an iPad, that limit is much higher, but it still tops out at 90-100MB or so.
I too am working on a point and click adventure. It has hundreds of images, about 100 soundFX, a few music tracks, plus all the logic for the game. My game is around 13MB.
I am a little curious as to what is making your game so large?
If you do have your game running on a device, I am very impressed!
I had to pull out every trick I know just to get my game working on the older devices.
At any rate, I love adventure games and am very excited to see yours!
I just started to make game in GameSalad, and I think it will take week or two to end it.
I was creating only graphics and music in these six or seven months. There is about 30 backgrounds or so, 8 music tracks made by the best polish game music composers, about 200 sound effects and few cutscenes. Intro and other movie makes this game really big (about 5000 frames for both, each is a png with resolution 480x320 (because I started doing it before any informations about Retina display in iPhone 4). I made movies in After Effects, and exported them as png sequences, and mov videos.
I really don't know if after publishing my game, the app file will be smaller than GameSalad project file, but this project file after adding main menu, intro and logo has about 500 MB. I'm quite new to GameSalad, because I started learning this application in last week, after purchasing a Mac (I used to have Windows).
I saw your game announcment sometime ago, and I was impressed about graphics. I love digital painting. Myself I made handrawn backgrounds.
Hopefully GameSalad will activate your account promptly, it shouldn't take that long.
Unfortunately, you will not be able to have anywhere close to 5000 frames of animation.
The iDevices simply cannot handle it.
The older iDevices, iPhone 3G and below and iPod Touch 2nd generation and below have a maximum RAM usage limit of about 40MB. The iPhone 3GS and 3rd generation iPod Touch are a little bit better, and the iPhone4 and iPad can handle about twice that.
That is PER SCENE in GameSalad. Your game can be larger, but each Scene can only use about 40MB or so before the device will crash.
But you also have to allow room for the Game Engine, which takes up about 15MB of RAM.
So for the older devices, you are left with about 20-25Mb of RAM to play with.
A 480x320 image takes up about 460K in RAM.
So if you have 50 of those images in a Scene, you are already at 23MB. And that is without any sounds, or Actors, or Rules, etc...
To pull off animations, you are going to have to use small Actors and use the Interpolate behavior to move them around and animate them.
You really have to think creatively to get it all to work.
I am still excited about your game though! I would love to see your artwork!
You are definitely going to run into some issues though, but there are many nice people here on the forums to help you out.
If I load a completely blank Scene, no Actors or anything, here is what I get:
Images: 0 KB
Sounds: 0 KB
Game Engine: 3.5 MB
Other: 4.8 MB
Total: 8.3 MB
I haven't restarted the device in a while, so those numbers might fluctuate if I did.
---
Here is what I get in GS Viewer for a typical Scene in my current game:
Images: 15.8 MB
Sounds: 62KB
Game Engine: 10.2 MB
Other: 11.5 MB
Total: 37.5 MB
This Scene has 47 Actors in it. Every Scene has two layers, one for the inventory system and menu buttons, and one for everything else.
The inventory layer always has 15 Actors in it in every Scene, which are fairly Rule heavy, as they control the inventory as well as all the camera controls (I have a bunch of camera transitions that I use between screens).
The other layer has varying amounts of Actors, but 20-30 is typical. Some of those Actors are quite complex, but most only have a single Rule determining their state - either alpha =1 or 0 or similar. This is for things like whether a door is open of closed, an item has been taken or moved from the room, that type of stuff.
That 37.5 total is typical for each Scene, which means that I only have a few MBs to play with.
Most everything you click on has a text popup associated with it. Those are all done in Photoshop, so I can control how they look. A lot of things have sound FX and animations too. Those text popups each use ~100Kb of RAM, and the animations and sound FX add to it as well. I have to carefully decide what can go into each Scene so I don't go over the limit.
Each Scene has about 3 screens in it, usually the main location and two or three close-up screens. However, due to some of the screens' complexity, I had to shuffle them around. I can't have two really complex screens within the same Scene.
Apart from the Main menu, the game is broken up into 14 Scenes, and has about 50 screens.
There are 30 items that you can collect in the game. Which means I actually had to have 60 main logic sequences. One for when you get an object, and one for when you use the object.
Some are easy, like simply picking them off a table. But others require manipulating gumball machines, clocks, complicated locks, etc.
It has been a serious juggling act to say the least!
I purchased it and received an update, it took a good part of the day to download it.