I’m currently making a game that will eventually contain over 2k+ bitmap costumes in it, and I have a somewhat general/technical question about that: how much do costumes affect a game’s performance really? Is it more stressful on a project when there is a higher amount of costumes regardless of how big their file size is (say 2k costumes but they’re only 5kb each), or does it depend more on the total file size of all costumes combined, even if the costume amount is small (example being 100 costumes that are 5mb each)?

I know this is a pretty general question, but this game is planning on swapping between costumes rapidly between potentially hundreds of clones. I know that vector costumes lag a project more when swapped between every frame, but I wanted to know if that would still apply to my case (where it’s 2k bitmap costumes that are very low in file size instead). How worried should I be about this?

I’ll run stress tests on my own regardless and dissect some other complex scratch games to see how well they’re optimized too, so I can get somewhat of a reference if this game will be possible or not before I dig too deep into it. Thank you for anyone who can give an answer

I haven’t used forums in awhile, so sorry if I asked this in the wrong place!

I'm not too sure, but I have this analogy in mind:
Say you're in a running race thing and you have two options. 1, to run fast for a long time, or 2, to run slowly/jog and then have to stop and move in a different direction. I'd say that a single large costume is like the first one, easier in my opinion, and the second is like lots of small costumes.
Based on this extensively scientific information, I'd say that one large costume is easier on scratch than 67 small ones.
Ok so I tried my best…

As someone who has made a project with 1000+ frames (link in siggy), I'd say yes, it gets quite laggy after a while ESPECIALLY on vector

ChristianScratcher1 wrote:

As someone who has made a project with 1000+ frames (link in siggy), I'd say yes, it gets quite laggy after a while ESPECIALLY on vector

Yes, especially in vector. Since there is no set number of pixels, and it changes when resized, I'd agree with this.

I have exciting news to share real quick!!

My oldest pvz fangame ran extremely badly and had over 1.3k vector costumes in it. It ran at about 5 fps on my computer and would freeze constantly. Today I wanted to test if bitmap would be more optimized, so I took that game and converted almost every vector costume to bitmap. Despite the file size going up by 15 mb, the game now went from running 5 fps to, well- a perfect 30! That shocked me so so SO much, and also basically answered my question if my next game I'm going to make will even be possible (which I know it is now!!!)

Case closed, basically