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32 vs 64

I started to worry yesterday that the size of the textures involved with adding a lot of infantry types would start to put a drain on lower end graphics cards, so I had a think about how to deal with that.

One thing I did right away was to rationalize the number of animations. A lot of the ones I chose were not really that essential, so by being a bit ruthless I was able to cut it down to 8. By halving the number of animations I was then able to fit two infantry man animations on a single sheet.

I further tested using 32x32 pixel sprites instead of the current 64x64 pixel sprites:


It's difficult to see the difference at the normal level of zoom. You have to zoom in quite a lot of notice:


Now you can see the big difference. I think the 64 tiles are much nicer than the 32 tiles. I don't think it would be worth cutting them down that much in quality.

But since I will be loading the sprites from an external file, I'll think about including a set of low rez sprites for those who have an older computer.

I took a lot at some old infantry models I made for an earlier version of the game and decided not to use them. The newer ones, even though they are hastily made, look much better than the older ones. I'll be making all new models for the infantry.
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