PocketMatrix

I am thinking about making a new game using eVB , but I need to know if there is a way to compress bmp's so that they take up very little space. My game will need to use a lot of pictures, but i dont want to take up too much space. I will need to be able to access them from eVB.

Here is a eVB PictureBox control that will let you use .bmp, .2bp, .gif, .jpeg, and .XBM image files.

ZBM!! YAh!, Not sure how to utilize that though. I think that is only for Snails. I have tried that picture box, but i cant get it to display anything. Any Suggetions?

ZBM/XBM is a standard format. At least one of those are. All I know it has BM in it, and is more or less a gzipped bitmap.

If i remember correctly .zbm is a gzipped bitmap, but peter also used some tricks to make it even smaller. In your case I would recommend to use a standard image format though.

hmm, I misread his post, I thought he said he didn't need much pictures. If you use lots of pictures it's definitely worth looking into compression/compressed (lossless) image formats.

Yeah, Dan, you have a point :) so here a dll for vb to use zlib:



But, with all the source code, it's easy to compile a dll in evc and interface it with evb after without coding a lot.

can't 8 bit (256 color) bitmaps use compression. (RLE)

for more info, read this, I found it really useful with gfDoom and reading skin data...



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Yeah that might be nice if CE supported RLE bitmaps. It doesn't though.