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The size of the published games.

The size of the published games.

Postby ant0N » 03 Jan 2015, 05:22

Hi guys! Hope the holiday was good :D :D

I am a little afraid of the size of the game in the Skyline. The minimum size of an empty stage == 180 megabytes. This can alienate a lot of users.
And even scares me the number .DLLs (40 pieces!) in the game folder. Can you hide? for example Packed in one archive...

Thank you! :D
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Re: The size of the published games.

Postby SolarPortal » 03 Jan 2015, 11:48

This is why we have the player version. It creates a small exe with no extra dlls, can be around 10mb in size.
It does however download a game player. The stand alone will reduce in size over time, but it is the main reason for the player based.
A large game won't be bothered about the stand alone size, but smaller games will.

To make this work, export your game, click on the stand alone drop down and change to player based.

This will be much smaller, the download only needs to happen once for that version.
Hope this helps.
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Re: The size of the published games.

Postby pgadesertrat » 05 Jan 2015, 19:44

What would you suggest in terms of a game in which you will have multiple add-on maps or levels? In our case this would be golf courses. The main game itself could be exported to a standalone player .exe but then each course would need to to be saved out of Skyline editor as either a scene (.xSkyScene), ideally to a packaged/compressed scene format or we would need to create a proprietary file format export/save option. In the main game interface you would then have a level list that would read all available maps/courses the user had available to select from and load upon demand.
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Re: The size of the published games.

Postby SolarPortal » 05 Jan 2015, 21:32

well that is an interesting concept pgadesertrat.
I believe the system is already capable though; obviously has not been tested yet ;).

As you said you could export the main game as an exe that uses the player or stand alone compiles. A default scene would be loaded in order to display the GUI for level loading.
You could have a .txt document( or other more secure file ) that has all the levels that can be loaded, this could be stored in the root of the asset directory.
The main games GUI menu will read this file and display a list of all levels and simply click & load the scene using lua.

Each level you make could be added into the asset directory as a .pak(compressed and secure) containing levels, models, textures, etc....
when the game exe is ran, it will automatically add those new resources into memory from the .pak file found on the root of the compiled games asset directory.
Any folder, .pak, .zip file in that folder will be loaded for the game to reference.

i think this would give you what you are after.
it would be great to put to the test, let us know how it goes. :)

Some information:
> Skyline currently loads all assets in the system that it finds. We do have plans on making it choose whats needed to save memory when running the game.
> (Commercial Feature Only) In the Skyline Editor main menu. Goto "Tools->Archiving->Make Game .PAK Package File". Choose a zip file and make it secure in a .pak format.
> .zip files that you convert into .pak files for loading can have no sub folders. All files must be on the root of the zip file. Since it is packaged up and cannot be opened again, it doesn't matter if there is no structure.
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Re: The size of the published games.

Postby pgadesertrat » 05 Jan 2015, 22:13

Ok, good to know the .pak format is already supported which should be ideal in this case. One question though: So, does that mean in order to make the .pak file I need to manually create a zip file containing all the assets used by my level/course? Sure would be nice if the Skyline editor had an option to do the zip creation automatically by copying and creating the zip in single hierarchy format.


Thanks!

Rat
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Re: The size of the published games.

Postby SolarPortal » 05 Jan 2015, 22:21

You could use the resource collector when your level is loaded to collect all required assets and dump them into one folder.
then simply zip all the assets and make a .pak.

The resource collector is in the "main menu->Tools->Resources->Resource Collector".
It is the tool that is automatically used when grabbing your game for export. :)

As a feature though, the collector could automatically make a zip for you, and save a bit more time ;)
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Re: The size of the published games.

Postby pgadesertrat » 06 Jan 2015, 16:04

Sorry for being so out of touch, the resource collector is exactly what I was describing ;) .


Thanks again!
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