Questions: 64Bit Windows UWP, large assets and memory management

Jase217

Member
So I'm working on a game that has large assets for the art, what I've done is made my own texture packer and put these in included files along with JSON files that get loaded when needed in game, each character has about 4 texture pages at 4096x4096 pixels. The rest of the stuff like props and decals consist of about 1-2 pages. Not to mention we have a large amount of wall, floor and ceiling textures at various sizes that I keep external too, which is necessary as each level only uses a handful at a time.

One of the character's texture pages, scaled down to fit on the fourm.
PipeGuy1Fourm.jpg

That said, when everything is placed in a level, I start to run into memory allocation issues.

Where possible, I'd rather keep the fidelity of the art, at least for the characters and stuff you look at up close, so I'm wondering what are my options?

Questions:
-Was wondering if it's better to import the character sprites into GM and let it's more efficient texture packer do it's work? But then every character, prop and what not is always loaded into RAM, on the other hand I remember reading external texture pages actually use more memory than internal pages regardless, any truth to that?
-Another question I have is whether I can use the Windows UWP 64bit export as a way to allow more memory usage on PC, and if I would have any problems distributing it, like to Steam? I assume it'll only work on Windows 10, but are there any other caveats?

If anyone has any insight or suggestions as to what I should do here I'd love to hear it, this is my first time working with large assets. By the way, I'm using GMS2 if that makes any difference.
 
Top