Yes you read correctly, this is the same map that you’ll be running through killing a variety of enemies in a few months, however you have no idea how much it stresses my computer being a whopping 50k – 50k pixels.
Yes, 50k x 50k is a total of 2.5 billion pixels! Before this I hadn’t calculated how many that was and now i’m realizing why it’s lagging my whole pc even for menial tasks such as opening calculator to work out that answer. I’m also writing this blog while photoshop is doing it’s thing, because every task from selecting areas with the magic wand to merging layers takes over a minute to complete, saving even takes up to 30 mins and stores as a 10gb PS file… So just imagine how big the actual map is going to be when I “render” it. My computer is also (I believe) at the lower end of the high end computers, if you’d like specifics place click on the “WIFI” page up the top and scroll to the bottom.
What’s weird is that photoshop is only using 5% of the CPU in total, what’s with that? I mean is it able to go faster but just doesn’t want to? Also the GPU is around 1% but RAM is 85% which is weird, I’m able to understand why it’s using so much RAM but 5% CPU, come on!
I haven’t been able to find a way to speed up photoshop with huge files, as i’m pretty sure “huge” files stop at around 10,000 x 10,000 pixels, this category is “freaking massively insanely size of hugeness”. Although if anyone has some tips on speeding it up feel free to leave a comment.
To explain what i’m doing in more depth it a little tricky but i’ll give it a shot. Basically i’m adding multiple terrain layers to the map then later i’m going to use an eraser tool to bring the terrain I want in a certain place to the top which would give it a nice slow alteration over the land’s surface. Because I decided to do it this way I have to add each terrain type as a different layer which takes a good few hours per layer mostly because of calculation times.
Obviously i’ll be reducing the quality for game cut-scenes and the mini-map, as well as dividing the map into sections when implementing them into each level so it doesn’t have to render the entire map when you’ll just be using half of it. The map is a huge step-up from the previous map which was a pretty basic looping texture, and this map even outdoes the rest of the graphics themes by being more detailed and thus looking a little out of place next to my smooth rounded character sprite, which i’m still working on to fix.
Well that’s about it, I think it may be done merging the layers now so i’ll take a look.
