How to include lots of large animation frames in iOS game

Question

I'm working on a universal iOS game project. The graphic artist has created this great set of dice animations, which is basically the dice rolling onto a service and coming to a halt on one of it's sides. There are 6 sets, each one of 22 frames. The problem is that these are full screen animations (640x624), but most of that area is blank, so they come in at about 40k per frame in the set.

Questions..

1) Is it unrealistic to include this type of animation in a universal app?

2) How could I get them into the game anyway, I think the atlas size I'm limited to is 1024x1024.

3) Any ideas on how to make this possible?

I'm using the Sparrow framework.

Answer 1

1) It is not unrealistic to include this type of animation in a universal app.

2/3) I would reduce the animations to key frames, where there is as little blank space as possible in each frame. Then, animate the dice's movement in code. So, if you ran the animation without any code, the dice would appear in one place spinning and whatnot. Write the code to model the dice's translational movement. This will also allow you to fit them on an atlas or two.

Answer 2

• Not unrealistic at all

• About the Atlas you can create them bigger than 1024x1024, here is an example of command:

  ./generate_atlas.rb --scale 0.5 --padding 2 --sharpen --maxsize 2048x2048 *.png atlas.xml

you always have to work with power of 2s.