Textures Compression and Size

Unity Engine
,
1

I am getting started using Unity and had a question I was hoping someone could helpnwith.

I am doing a 2D Only Game in which I have many character images that are 256x256. Upon importing textures into unity (256x256 PSD Files), I set the Format in the Inspector to 16-Bits. In the inspector, it is saying the file is 128KB. If I set the format to Compressed in the inspector, the file size is 32KB (This way, the image looks horrible in-app and is all jagged). Are these actual file storage sizes that will increase the size of my app, or just sizes in memory?

The reason I ask is these are very simple 2-3 color files that if I save from Photoshop as a PNG, they are only about 4KB and quality is perfect. This app has several hundred images, and the app size will be way too large if each texture is going to use 128KB of disk space, and this seems unnecessary when a 4KB PNG looks just as good.

Is there another way I should be importing images to optimize disk space without having such bad quality and pixelation?

2

If it matters, I am using Sprite Manager 2 also.

3

I just did some testing on this myself a couple of days ago.

My conclusions where that yes, you will get a bigger app file when you use a higher quality texture. It doesn’t matter what size a png file will have since it will not be included in your app, instead the texture are saved in an asset file that Unity creates.

One good news however is that the app you send to apple will be zipped. That means that even though your texture could be 5 mb it might come in at 0,5 mb depending on how much it could get compressed. So a X mb texture doesn’t mean the app will become X mb larger.

4

I am having the exact same problem. has any one gotten back to you?

5

Hey all.

I just did a tips video on texture sizes and compression for the games we build in Unity. Hope you find it useful:

All the best
Martin