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caffeinade on 18 December 2017
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Zkuq said:
caffeinade said:

Storage space requirements for sprites are incredibly small.

A 24x32 pixel PNG can be as small as(or smaller depending on what the image is) 368 bytes.
Now that is just as a PNG, you can have custom formats that could be much smaller than that.
A FLIF file of the same image (just a quick conversion, I haven't played around with FLIF as much as PNG) is 215 bytes.
Both files are lossless (FLIF can do lossy too).

Just some cool information I wanted to share.

Huh, I've never heard of FLIF. I'm familiar enough with PNG though. Anyway, there are 2D games with higher resolution sprites as well (e.g. Cuphead), which is why I didn't say 2D games always use less memory. I reckon storage space requirements ever for large sprites with large areas with fairly uniform colours are much smaller than more realistic and varying sprites though. Suppose someone made a fairly realistic-looking 2D game with good animations, however, and I would expect it to use a fair amount of memory. Please do correct me if I'm wrong, of course!

FLIF is pretty cool from what I have seen and tested.
It is FOSS too, so it gets extra points in my books.
http://flif.info/
The main issue with using FLIF: it is almost universally unsupported.
Hopefully that changes someday; it really is cool.

I tested a few sprite sheets from Cuphead:
https://www.spriters-resource.com/pc_computer/cupheaddontdealwiththedevil/sheet/98215/
https://www.spriters-resource.com/pc_computer/cupheaddontdealwiththedevil/sheet/98516/
https://www.spriters-resource.com/pc_computer/cupheaddontdealwiththedevil/sheet/97147/

Psycarrot
Download: 7.13MB
optipng: 5.84MB
FLIF: 3.73MB

Moe Tato
Download: 3.85MB
optipng: 3.10MB
FLIF: 2.13MB

Botanic Panic
Download: 1.74MB
optipng: 1.47MB
FLIF: 1.25MB

I am pretty sure Cuphead's download size is about 2GB.

With sprites you can make them modular; Terraria seems to do this for characters and stuff.
Sprites have a pretty big downfall being: it is hard to compress them in a lossy manor.

3D games have the huge upside of being able to use interpolation to figure out what goes between animation key-frames.
3D games (and some 2d ones) can also use procedural animation techniques (rag-doll, IK systems, ect), further reducing the need for additional animation data.
A downside of 3D graphics, is easily, the fact that you have to store all of the textures for each object in a scene.
With a 2D game you only need to store the data for what can be seen from a fixed perspective (generally speaking).
Generally speaking players are not moving a camera around in a 2D title, so you can save a lot of storage space, and artist hours by not authoring the unseeable.

Personally I am very excited for the future; there are some very cool application of neural networks, I really want to see incorporated into games and game development.

Imagine the possibility of a neural network powered: sprite animation interpolation system.
Where the developer only packs in a set number of key frames, and lets the game engine generate the missing frames using a neural network.
Or.
A neural network based upscaler (lookup waifu2x) built into the game engine; allowing the artist to pack lower res assets into the download, to let the engine unpack the final assets when required.
Or we could get some really neat texture compression system that uses a neural network to further enhance compression ratios, somehow.

Volta and Navi really help me keep hope in the future of video games.