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The Number One Educational Resource for the Game Industry

Session Name: By Grabthar's Hammer, What a Savings: Making the Most of Texture Memory with Sprite Dicing
Speaker(s): Jon Manning
Company Name(s): Secret Lab
Track / Format: Programming

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Overview: Are your sprites making you run out of memory? A common problem facing games that use sprite animations is the amount of texture memory each frame uses, and this is a particularly serious constraint on mobile devices. To solve this, sprite packing and atlasing can be used to more efficiently make use of memory, but these solutions can lead to wasted space in atlases that can't be completely filled. Grabthar's Hammer is a tool the Secret Lab team wrote for the mobile port of 'Night in the Woods' that solves this problem in a more efficient way, by using sprite dicing to maximize atlas usage with minimal wastage. This session will present the technique, discuss how 'Night in the Woods' was adapted to use it, and how sprite dicing techniques can be taken further by using techniques from the world of video compression to get the largest number of sprites out of your memory budget.

GDC 2018

Jon Manning

Secret Lab

free content

Programming

Programming

Visual Arts

Visual Arts