Confused about Tiled tilemap import & atlas

Silver-Streak · May 24, 2023, 11:17pm

Hello!

Yes. GDevelop has two limitations that are shared with all game engines, and specifically any other game engines that utilize HTML5. The first would be the browser-based limit. Browsers have a hard limit of around 2000x2000 pixels for a single image (anything larger is scaled within memory so only the currently visible part is rendered, the rest is compressed in some cases), so that is the maximum supported by GDevelop since exported games are either run directly in a browser (web export) or wrapped in electron (which is a browser).

Older mobile devices will have even harsher limits, usually around 1000x1000 maximum for a single graphic resource.

The other limit would be GPUs.GPUs themselves actually have hard limits unless you’re doing on-the-fly texture compression, but that is usually only supported by brand new engines like Unreal 5. I include some of the math in another thread:

Question about preloading resources

You are trying to load 2 gigs worth of textures into memory at once (when rendering graphics as textures with PixiJS (and many 2D graphics renderers), all compression is gone, so you’re loading 1620x1080x4bytes for 32 bit color into memory, so 6,998,400 bytes * 300 frames, so 2,099,520,000 bytes, or ~2 gigabytes).

No amount of preloading is going to solve that load time, and you will constantly run into performance issues with that, in addition to some GPUs not being able to render it at all. After running once it may cache a bit, but it’s going to cause issues on most PCs.

To be clear, as far as I know no game uses something this large. The maximum texture size Chromium (the browser tech used by Electron, which is used to make your game an exe) supports is ~2048x2048 at all, and that’s for a single frame. Most games keep their sprites under 500x500. Even Spiritfarer, one of the most graphically impressive 2D games on the market, doesn’t have sprites over ~500x500 as far as I am aware, and their backgrounds are cut up over multiple chunks.

I do not believe you will not be able to solve the issue you’re experiencing without reducing the amount of frames in the animation or reducing the size of your sprites.

Overall, PixiJS (the renderer) runs in a browsers, and while it can technically support a size of 4096x4096, browsers do not. You’ll want to keep all of your assets under 2000x2000 max.