SwissCM
5 Sep 2010, 08:18
Are they compressed before they are sent to other players? Because it seems like a huge waste of bandwidth and time to send 12MB TGA files over the internet when you could be using a format like PNG instead. I think even the PSP version had PNG support.
Most levels if compressed in PNG would be around 500KB by comparison. It would also take up less space on the HDD, is a completely open format, every image editing application supports it and I mean, really guys, TGA? What is this the mid-nineties?
Perhaps even a hybrid PNG/JPEG with PNG being for the alpha mask and JPEG being for the image. Send over a low quality JPEG and alpha mask at the start and then while the game is progressing send over the higher quality PNG.
It sucks that if I want to play a custom level online all the other players seem to get is the mask from the level, it may have made sense back when everyone was on 56k dialup but Steam requires a broadband connection and 500KB is next to nothing nowadays.
Other annoyances:
* The game doesn't seem to work nicely with dual monitors (usually after Alt+Tabbing).
* Voice chat is handled very poorly, with no indication of whether the mic audio is being sent or not.
* Zooming could be better. I understand that on the 360/PSP etc it made sense to have 3 zoom levels, but with a mouse wheel it makes more sense to have a more gradual zoom.
* Add anti-aliasing to the graphics options menu. May seem like a small thing but it makes the worms look nicer.
I haven't had any crashes or audio problems myself, but obviously that is an issue too.
Most levels if compressed in PNG would be around 500KB by comparison. It would also take up less space on the HDD, is a completely open format, every image editing application supports it and I mean, really guys, TGA? What is this the mid-nineties?
Perhaps even a hybrid PNG/JPEG with PNG being for the alpha mask and JPEG being for the image. Send over a low quality JPEG and alpha mask at the start and then while the game is progressing send over the higher quality PNG.
It sucks that if I want to play a custom level online all the other players seem to get is the mask from the level, it may have made sense back when everyone was on 56k dialup but Steam requires a broadband connection and 500KB is next to nothing nowadays.
Other annoyances:
* The game doesn't seem to work nicely with dual monitors (usually after Alt+Tabbing).
* Voice chat is handled very poorly, with no indication of whether the mic audio is being sent or not.
* Zooming could be better. I understand that on the 360/PSP etc it made sense to have 3 zoom levels, but with a mouse wheel it makes more sense to have a more gradual zoom.
* Add anti-aliasing to the graphics options menu. May seem like a small thing but it makes the worms look nicer.
I haven't had any crashes or audio problems myself, but obviously that is an issue too.