Hi,
there's a board game I play that I decided I liked so much, I wanted an
online version. MetaCard + four hours = prototype --is MetaCard great or
what?
But now I have a slight problem. The board is simple, but with patterned
squares, much like a chessboard with marble and ebony squares, for
example. So I created one tile as a gif, created an image, and imported
the image as a file reference. The standard board contains over 250
squares. So I blithely wrote two repeats to get me an arrangement of
16x16 of these images, each using a file reference to pull in the same
gif file. BOOM! goes MetaCard on the Mac. So I up the default partition
to 20mb, and all is well. Then I decide I want different sizes of board.
I choose 20x20 as a nice maximum size, and run the board construction
routine. No crash, but by the time MC is done, the Mac is reporting that
MC is using over 30mb. Good for MC that it was able to grab what it
needs, but still--30?
The board construction routine does check and delete previous
incarnations of the board, so I'm not piling up extra images. So what is
causing the enormous appetite?
I'd like to be able to support irregular board shapes, so I need to be
able to construct just about any shape. I'm thinking one way to reduce
memory usage would be to have an image that was as big as I want to ever
get--say 25x25 squares, but all in one image instead of in 625 small
ones, and then use a polygon, setting the points appropriately, to mask
out the squares I don't want to use. This would be a fair bit of code, so
I figured I'd ask before undertaking it--is one large image going to use
a lot less memory than a bunch of small ones that add up to the same
area? And if so, why in particular?
Thanks to any who have insight.
gc
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