Hi.

My company are creating a game with GS. But, as the game "grows", more and more images (bitmaps) are inserted into the game. I realized that all the bitmaps declared with the instruction (e.g.) "bmap picture = <picture.tga>" are preloaded to the RAM of the computer. Due to this, the game uses 130MB of RAM without doing anything, not even loading a level. Is there anything I can do to declare the bitmaps but don't load all them in the computer's memory? I mean, how can I load the bitmaps only when I need them and free my memory when I don't need them anymore?

Thanks everybody

PS: Sorry about my poor english!!

Felipe.

If in your code, you do not need them, you can "purge" them with bmap_purge(). This will cause the engine to reload them if they come into view again. You can also use bmap_preload, to make sure its loaded before its needed, or else you might take a small fps hit waiting for the engine to load it off disk.

I'm also a fan of bmap_load(), which you can read about in the beta docs. This will load an image from disk into a previously allocated chunk of memory.

Maybe I'm wrong, but doesn't "purge" remove bitmaps from texture memory only? In such case it would not free RAM but only video memory...

look all the textures and skins are loaded to the video memory
so the bigger video memory you have, more textures to load...
when you use purge function its remove it from video memory.
there is a lot of ways to make this process lighter(less memory) and quicker
read the manual
search for : predefines variables & pointers and look to enviroment and video subs...
there are some predefines that can free you video memory and make the loading quicker

and that last way is to change the resulotion. bigger res = bigger file;