CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaandroidout-of-memorydalvik
Nafiz Bayındır
Nafiz Bayındır

Reputation: 495

Bitmap size exceeds VM budget when game development

I am developing a game on android.Like tower defense. I am using surface view.I am using some image as bitmap.(Spritesheets, tilesets, buttons, backgrounds,efects vs.) Now images are nearly 5-6 mb.And i get this error when i run my game:

Bitmap size exceeds VM budget

19464192-byte external allocation too large for this process.

I call images like that

BitmapFactory.decodeResource(res, id)

and i put it to array. I can't scale images.I am using all of them. I tried that

options.inPurgeable=true;

and it work but the image is loading very slowly.I load a spritesheet with that and when it is loading, i get very very low fps.

What can I do?

Upvotes: 6

Views: 525

Answers (2)

Luke
Luke

Reputation: 5564

I've had this problem too; there's really no solution other than to reduce the number/size of bitmaps that you have loaded at once. Some older Android devices only allocate 16MB to the heap for your whole application, and bitmaps are stored in memory uncompressed once you load them, so it's not hard to exceed 16MB with large backgrounds, etc. (An 854x480, 32-bit bitmap is about 1.6MB uncompressed.)

In my game I was able to get around it by only loading bitmaps that I was going to use in the current level (e.g. I have a single Bitmap object for the background that gets reloaded from resources each time it changes, rather than maintaining multiple Bitmaps in memory. I just maintain an int that tracks which resource I have loaded currently.)

Your sprite sheet is huge, so I think you're right that you'll need to reduce the size of your animations. Alternatively, loading from resources is decently fast, so you might be able to get away with doing something like only loading the animation strip for the character's current direction, and have him pause slightly when he turns while you replace it with the new animation strip. That might get complicated though.

Also, I highly recommend testing your app on the emulator with a VM heap set to 16mb, to make sure you've fixed the problem for all devices. (The emulator usually defaults to 24mb, so it's easy for that to go untested and generate some 1-star reviews after release.)

Upvotes: 2

Graham Smith
Graham Smith

Reputation: 25757

I am not a game dev however I would like to think I know Android enough.

Loading images of the size is almost certain to throw errors. Why are the images that file size?

There is an example at http://p-xr.com/android-tutorial-how-to-paint-animate-loop-and-remove-a-sprite/. If you notice he has an explosion sprite of only ~200Kb. Even a more detailed image would not take much more file space.

OK some suggestions:

  • Are you loading all your spritesheets onto a single sheet or is each spritesheet in a seperate file? If they are all on one I would split them up.

  • Lower the resolution of the images, an Android device is portable and some only have a low resolution screen. For example the HTC Wildfire has a resolution of 240x320 (LDPI device) and is quite a common device. You have not stated the image dimensions so we can't be sure if this is practical.

Finally; I am not a game programmer but I found this tutorial (part of the same series) quite enlightening - http://p-xr.com/android-tutorial-2d-canvas-graphics/. I wonder if you are applying a pattern that is not appropriate for Android, however without code I cannot say.

Right something a little off topic but worth noting...

People under estimate the power of the View. While there is a certain amount of logic to using a SurfaceView, the standard View will do quite a lot on its own. A SurfaceView more often than not requires an underlying thread to run (that you will have to setup yourself) in order to make it work. A View however calls onDraw(), which can be utilized in a variety of ways including the postinvalidate() method (see What does postInvalidate() do?).

In any case it might be worth checking out this tutorial http://mindtherobot.com/blog/272/android-custom-ui-making-a-vintage-thermometer/. Personally, it was an excellent example of a custom View and what you can do with them. I rewrote a few sections and made a pocket watch app.

Upvotes: 0

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