Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 9.54
Close-ups of the texture page comparison (See page C11 for color version.)
Reducing page size is a quick and easy way to retrieve some memory, but it can affect the
look of your characters.
Bit Depth
What about altering the bit depth? Bit depth measures the amount of color information
available in an image. Greater bit depth means more colors are available. An image with
a bit depth of 8 has 256 possible colors; one with a bit depth of 24 has roughly 16 million
possible colors.
Up to now we have been working with 24-bit images, but what would they look like if
we reduced them to 8-bit (256 colors), and how much would the file size be reduced? A
512x512 image at 769 KB would be knocked down to 257 KB—not as much as reducing
the image size, but we do get to keep the same amount of pixels.
1.
To reduce the bit depth in Photoshop, go to Image > Mode > Indexed Color. This
opens up the options window shown in
Figure 9.55
.
FIGURE 9.55
Indexed Color options
2.
The Colors option should be automatically set to 256; if it's not, set it to this
amount.
3.
The other option to play around with is Dither. Because we are reducing the num-
ber of colors, we can specify whether we want Photoshop to try to blend the re-
