My card isn't new (GeForce 7300LE), and it supports up to 4096 x 4096.

As far as I'm aware, "many frames of animation" will have no impact on hardware limitations. It just comes down to size and quantity.

One of my friends actually implemented streaming animation for a boxing game. Each large frame was loaded from the hard drive, on the fly, and rendered to the screen. It was pretty smooth, but the game and visuals were not demanding.

There isn't a maximum size just as there is not a maximum size on meshes that you can render in 3D. Why? Because if it is 'too big', then you break it into smaller parts, and render each of them individually. You can do the same thing with 2D images if you are running into space constraints. If you need one spite that is 8Kx8K, it can be just as easily represented behind the scenes as 4 4Kx4K pictures, or 16 2Kx2K pictures. As was already pointed out, video memory will be a bigger problem, but there is only so much space that you are going to be rendering to [the screen isn't that big, and in 2D projects, you can much more aggressively cull unnecessary images]. It really isn't realistic to expect a 2D game to max out the memory on modern graphics cards if you are anything short of wasteful with your memory use.

So no, there is no limit. There are limits on individual textures, but if you need more, you just cut it up and issue more draw calls. Also, you can put each animation frame on its own texture if you want. The number of frames of animation doesn't really effect texture size either, because you can just put each frame on its own texture if need be.

Also, game design?

Quote:Original post by Drigovas
It really isn't realistic to expect a 2D game to max out the memory on modern graphics cards if you are anything short of wasteful with your memory use.

It's more than realistic. I'd expect a 2D game to be far more demanding on video memory than a 3D game. A 3D character just needs a body and a paint job in v-ram, then you can animate them to do anything. A 2D character needs every trivial action they can perform stored in v-ram. If the characters are large, that space is taken up quickly.

Don't use pixels anymore.

Vectoring is the way of the future.

Quote:Original post by Cpt Mothballs
Don't use pixels anymore.

Vectoring is the way of the future.

Sweeping generalizations are generally far from the truth. Bitmap and Vector graphics are both valid tools for expressing 2d.

Streaming technologies are sufficiently advance to stream on demand sprite animations with intelligent preaching ( ie first 1-2 frames precached while stream operations executes async on 2nd thread for smooth game play ) only limited by your hard drive space.

Games like Diablo I and II used such a system I believe and they are like 5 years old. With todays hardware you can stream faster and more high resolution sprites than ever before. I guess people don't do this because the cost of making content is so much cheaper as 3D models vs prerendered high resolution sprites. Though that might be changing with more free mature 3D tools coming out.


Good Luck!

-ddn