Remco de Korte wrote:

> Jon A. Cruz wrote:
> >
> > 2) BMP for a game? I'd really suggest trying to stay away from BMP if at
> > all possible. Store things as PNG and just convert to BITMAP as you read
> > in.
>
> Again: why? What would be the advantage of PNG over BMP? It loads much slower.
> >

"It loads much slower". That sounds like a start at premature optimization, which
is the root of all evil. :-)

How much is "much slower". Tests should be made. I'm guessing on the order of
perhaps a second at the extreme. Depends on your system. Disk speed is going to be
a bottleneck anyway, and modern processors get quite fast. The main point would be
to test it in context and see how it works overall.

Another thing to consider is when will this apply?  Usually this slight slowdown
would occur once at the begining of the program or level. While a splash screen is
being displayed. Balance that with having the equivalent of keeping all your
images ZIPped on disk the entire time the user has the game installed but is not
playing it.

Also by taking that hit on speed at one point during startup you also buy the
addition of transparency by color or by alpha channel, etc.


Anothing thing that had been mentioned was RLE BMP files. Problem is that RLE
compression really sucks for most things (that's my professional opinion from
having worked with RLE a lot :-)  Also, using it will make the BMP's incompatible
with a lot of programs. But at least it's not quite as bad as "right-side-up"
BMP files.

--
"My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks
But it was obsolete before I opened the box" - W.A.Y.

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