Need some advice on setting up/using pictures

[Rhino]

Hiya, I’m in the middle of setting up my games assets, and just have a few questions to ask someone with more experience. The questions are all linked, so I hope it’s okay to put them together in one thread.

I’m sure these are answers I could learn the hard way, but I don’t want to be ¾ into my game and realise there’s something wrong and everything needs to be changed, so I’d appreciate the wisdom


Q1: How many pictures can you have on screen without causing lag?

(If show pictures even cause lag, I know that parallaxes do, but didn’t find anything about pictures through the ‘show picture’ command.)

Because of the way my pictures are set up (see Q2) I think there might be up to 20 different ones showing up during a cut scene. These are all dialogue, so I’m not worried about player or event movement, but was wondering if they’ll be any lag with sound effects, text drawing speed or blinking between changing pictures (see Q3)


Q2: What’s the best way to set up actor busts with different emotions?

I’ve currently got my busts set up like this;

Spoiler

Each piece has it’s own picture (e.g eyes, eyebrows, mouth,) I like this method, because it allows me to create a really varied range of expressions, but I’m worried that using so many pictures may cause some errors (see Q1) and of course, they all take up space. Would it be better to set up my pictures so each face is a complete set of eyes & eyebrows or whatever, rather than using so many layers?

Spoiler: I.e

Q3: What’s the best way to set up the cutscenes in maps?

I’m using TDDP_Preload Manager to load all the images when entering a map, because of this, I was worried that if I have a map with all my cutscenes, it’s going to take forever to load. Would it be better to create lots of small maps with each event on, or do maps take up a lot of space (even when blank)/would the images be reloaded each time?

If I understand correctly, RPG Maker caches an image that’s already loaded whilst you’re playing, but does that remain if you close and re-open the game, or does it have to reload everything?

 

[Milennin]

Pretty sure it shouldn't cause much, if any lag. I've done up to like 10 pictures at a time, and it ran as smooth as butter.

 

[dragoonwys]

I never used TDDP_Preload Manager before but I have used over 20+ pictures in my project at once in cutscenes (it was a comic page looking thing with multiple layers for the panels, glad I'm through with that!) and it never cause me any audio or text lag before, so you should be good!

And for the emotions, whole parts would be quicker to use considering it's less work positioning all of them than single parts. The only draw back I can think off having them all separate is that you have more numbers to note down if you want to reuse the same emote with consistency. (happy emote= mouth position, brow position, etc)

 

[Rhino]

That's a relief, I'm glad there shouldn't be any issues with lag

I've already sorted out the positing using Archeia's image positioning utility (I would be dead without it!) But it is quite a mess to event and keep track of what expression is actually showing.. So weighing those pros and cons, I think it might be easier having whole parts after all!

 

[Andar]

The reason why some parallax maps cause lag is because they're too large. If the pictures (or parallaxes) remain screen-sized, you can use quite a number of them.