Legacy GM Help with External Files

[Valerie]

Hi friends!

I make a lot of pseudo-3d games with rendered cutscenes that use animated sprites. Despite heavily compressing them, they tend to eat up Gms1.4s rather limited memory quite fast.

Id like to store all of the animated sprites for a particular level in an external folder, and then, at the beginning of that level, load them in and load out the other ones.

is this possible? Are there any workarounds?

 

[YellowAfterlife]

You can use sprite_add and sprite_delete to load/unload sprites when necessary.

Compressing them will not help with memory use, as images have to be uncompressed for GPU to be able to draw them (saving for specific formats like DXT that cannot be easily used in GameMaker).

 

[Valerie]

@YellowAfterlife thanks for your help!!! Would you suggest creating a manual loading screen while that’s happening, or is it pretty instantaneous?

just wanna make sure it won’t cause the game to freeze at the beginning of each level while that’s happening

 

[YellowAfterlife]

@YellowAfterlife thanks for your help!!! Would you suggest creating a manual loading screen while that’s happening, or is it pretty instantaneous?

just wanna make sure it won’t cause the game to freeze at the beginning of each level while that’s happening

Loading time depends on the size of the image(s).
You can show a loading screen as needed by measuring time it takes for sprite_add (by comparing current_time from before and after the call) and letting the game draw a loading screen frame once it exceeds a threshold (e.g. 50ms)