PNG on iOS?

Questions & Answers
1

According to the editor log, my game is 99.8% textures. It is now almost 500MB. The source images are all PNG format, and clock in at under 45MB. How can I force Unity to use the PNGs as-is on iOS instead of bloating them to ridiculous sizes?

Using PVRTC compression is NOT the answer. Using 16-bit textures is NOT the answer either.

I realize that PVRTC is the native compression for iOS, but my game is a 2D game that needs to be pixel perfect. Compression makes the images completely unusable. Switching to 16-bit only cuts the file size in half, and so much color is lost that again, the images are unusable. My last game was made without Unity, just OpenGL. I know iOS has library functions to natively load a PNG to an OpenGL texture because I’VE USED IT. I’m not concerned with optimizing for performance here, I just want to get my game under the 50MB over-the-air download size limit to maximize downloads. My assets are WELL under 50MB (even with Unity’s dlls etc), this should not be a difficult task. I have Unity Pro with iOS Pro. How can this be accomplished? I’ve only found others with the same problem, but nobody with the answer. Surely this is just a hidden checkbox in Unity’s options somewhere, right? RIGHT? PLEASE?

Thanks!

3

See this page for the texture formats that are supported. PNG are not natively supported (even in Windows), they are always converted to a texture format that is recognized by the hardware (graphic cards do not treat PNG files).

So you need to decrease the size of your images and/or use atlasing to reduce the number of resources used at any time.

You can also take a look at Optimizing Performance in iOS.

Or do what @paulius-liekis suggested. But at runtime, you will still have 500 MB of textures in memory, which may crash your game.

2

Unity allows you loading PNGs using WWW class, so maybe you could load your PNG using WWW from local storate. Not most effective way, but should work.

4

I was struggling with this as well and just found image quality settings for Unity 4.6 under Edit->Project Settings->Quality.

More information can be found here: Unity - Manual: Quality