256x256 parallax map

[Morganis]

Hello everyone,
I was hoping for a bit of advice. I am doing an open world game and want to know if its possible to make a 256x256 parallax map for the world map without any issues. The rest of my maps will be small in comparison but to make this game work as far as world map, I need to make it the max size I can. Is this doable? Thanks so much for any advice.

 

[Eliaquim]

Never tried. My biggest parallax maps has 40x40 and it lags. I have 12 gb of ram and 700 of vram.
In cellphones im sure this wont work.
But in pc i dont know...

 

[bgillisp]

For one that is going to be a astronomically huge file. I ran through the file size to store that picture assuming 24 bit depth and it came back 452 MB (256 x 256 at 48 x 48 tile size is a 12,288 x 12,288 picture). That's just for that picture. Then to store it in RAM it's much higher than that, probably even higher than 32 GB. So I doubt you can do that as a parallax map, just because computers don't have enough RAM to even load that image in the first place into the engine, much less do anything else.

Source for checking file size: https://www.scantips.com/basics1d.html
I don't off the top of my head remember how the amount of memory it needs is computed, but I do know it is bigger than the file size by a long shot.

On another note, you honestly probably can use a smaller map. FF6's world map was only 127 x 127 tiles.

 

[Andar]

it depends on what you do on the world map, and what target devices you have.

For full computers, the usual maximum size for regular maps done by parallax mapping is 100x100.
Larger maps might be possible on high-end computers, but will not work on low-spec computers.

However there is a reason why I specified "regular" maps - that means maps with the usual amount of moving events, decorations and so on.
A world map usually has only transfer events and nothing else - that will increase the maximum size until it lags.

And here is another info:
The pictures you save in PNG format are compressed to reduce filesize. However, a picture in memory cannot be compressed if it is to be used.
Save your parallax as BMP, that file format has no compression. THAT is the memory size in RAM you'll need in addition to everything else for the game to work.
@bgillisp already calculated that size - 452 MB is the size needed for it in memory (he is wrong in thinking it would need more for the picture). What it does need more is the rest of the engine, which is also a lot of RAM.
A 16 GB computer should be able to handle this unless there area lot of background programs working - but nothing less will be unless you have a really clean windows system.

Again the difference is what the events on that map do - I would never consider anything other than a world map of this size simply because handling several hundred NPC-Events on the map in addition to that (and you would need several hundreds if that map was a town or so) would push the RAM- and CPU-use much beyond that limit.

Mobile devices are flat out - but that is exactly the reason why the mapsize was limited to 256, Ace was able to handle 500x500 tiled maps (although those did get to the limits of the older computers as well)

 

[MushroomCake28]

RAM isn't the issue. 16 GB is more than enough for that. The bottleneck will be the pure processing power (that's why for mobiles it's going to be harder, even maybe unplayable, since the single cores on mobiles are weaker and much slower than PC cores).

With a decent processor (not necessarily high end, I'm sure Ryzen 3 for AMD or an i5 second gen and above will run alright) on a desktop (a bit more tricky for laptops) you should have not much problem.

So it really depends on the platform you target:
- Mobile: no
- Desktop: yes
- Desktop/laptop: maybe, but be careful and test your game on many devices, including low power dual core laptops.

 

[bgillisp]

@Andar : Thanks for the clarification. I thought there was one more term calculated for how it was stored in engine based on something you posted, but maybe I was thinking of bit depth which I already included. Wasn't sure.

 

[Morganis]

Thank you all very much for the info. My goal is to make an open world game I guess like ultima 6. I want the player to be able to walk through the towns rather then stepping on a small icon of a town then entering a different map for inside the town. I'm not into the whole map to map games with smaller maps that you walk through then enter another map to keep going. So What I want cant be done? Dang Again thank you all kindly

 

[bgillisp]

Break it up into zones. I'm attempting to do what you mention for my next game, and what I did was break up the overland map into zones of 45 x 45 tiles. You can use any size, in fact you could do it where each zone is what fits on your screen only and then move to a new screen (map) when you leave the edge of it. That would keep ram usage very low compared to any other option if you parallax.