Pixel Limit?

I know Blitz3D has a poly limit, but does Blitz3D and BlitzPlus have a "picture limit?"

What I mean is that if you were to load the game with tons and tons of pictures, would it slow down?

No, it doesn't have a limit. Every poly counts, of course, but it doesn't have a limit.




Of course. Drawing them takes cpu/gpu time and storing them takes memory/videomemory. Loading more things into videomemory than you have vidram for can be particularly nasty. You don't want to be getting all anal about everything and end up cutting things out of your game though. Just be aware that it all adds up, and make sure that everything you load and everything you draw *needs* to be there, is adding something to the game, and that you couldn't do it better another way.

OK, thanks. The problem was really basic common sense, though I wanted to make sure of it.

I was just using "poly limit" as a term to mean "how many polys Blitz can handle before blowing up."

@Digital Fortress
No matter how large an image/bitmap you may have, you could always select/code to only load parts of the file - containing the content of the image/bitmap actually shown. Yes?

Yeah.

What is the average "poly limit" of Blitz?

There is no "average" poly limit. There are far too many factors for any number I could give to possibly be accurate. If you were running a gf2 and had 250 surfaces, you could be crippled with a couple thousand polys. If you had a GF4 and only 5 surfaces, you could have good framerates with 200,000.

Poly limits will rarely ever be a problem anyway. You'll find your frame rates crippled from skeletal animation ( dog slow ) surface limits ( crippling ) and whatever else you might have long before you hit a poly limit.

I've said it before, but you're going about it in the wrong way. Don't take a poly limit / pixel limit / image limit and work back to a game. Make your game with what it needs without being wasteful, and then work on optimizing anything that needs optimizing.

Just use your AvailVidMem() and TotalVidMem() to get an idea of how much space you have left. They keep track of, well, your video memory, which includes pictures, textures, fonts, and such. (The functions return in bytes.)

A warning though: This only represents your computer, of course. I've found it helpful to target for 4,000,000 bytes as an "adverage" measurement. Or, you can just set them up as (AvailVidMem()/TotalVidMem()) to get a percentage.