I’ve seen varying mentions of max channel size. I’ve read 750k, 2mb, and 50mb, which is it?
If possible I’d love to include everything for my game right in the channel without having to download anything on-the-fly every time people play. This mainly is about music, sfx, and “larger” graphics files.
something around 49 megs, it varies on the older devices. Newer ones can “swap” loaded channels, which kind of allows more, but not really.
in my opinion a large channel would be a horrible thing to do to users. There is limited storage space on these devices, and no way to install a channel on just one roku player (with microsd) if you have many players. You would be kind of screwing them over, and roku doesn’t give users any way to know how much space channels take up before or after install (that I’m’ aware of?)
Just my own opinion.
Most of my games are around 1-2 megs by design for this reason. There are plenty of ways to keep your pkg small. (that sounded bad) I have an upcoming sidescroller game kuglo with a ton of music, fx, and gfx that’s around 4 megs, and again, a lot of work goes into keeping this file size to make sure users don’t get boned by installing my channel.
If you have large graphics, experiment a bit with png, jpeg, etc. some images compress better with certain formats. A flat color image is a tiny PNG but not so much jpeg. Certain images compress really well as jpeg, no reason at all to include a 300k image when you can’t see a difference with a 90k compressed jpeg. Music has a ton of room for compression but takes a little effort to optimize and can vary depending on the content.
Again, just throwing out my own opinion, doesn’t mean it’s any more correct than someone else’s, just how I feel.
“Komag” wrote:
I’ve read 750k, 2mb, and 50mb, which is it?
750k and 2mb were the hard limits for the legacy players. 50mb is for players running the current firmware, but as BradC suggested, you should target as small as possible, unless you want to inconvenience your users.
“BradC” wrote:
… no way to install a channel on just one roku player (with microsd) if you have many players. You would be kind of screwing them over, and roku doesn’t give users any way to know how much space channels take up before or after install (that I’m’ aware of?)
Sounds like those would be useful features for users.
“BradC” wrote:
I have an upcoming sidescroller game kuglo with a ton of music, fx, and gfx that’s around 4 megs, and again, a lot of work goes into keeping this file size to make sure users don’t get boned by installing my channel… (compression…)…
I’m aware of compressing images, and mine are mostly tiny, but what about music and sfx?
For sfx, are you using something other than 44.1khz, 16bit mono? Are you just keeping the sounds very short/brief? I tried 22050hz 8bit mono files, 1/4 the size, and they played and sounded fine, but I’ve read I’m asking for trouble if I deviate from 44.1khz, 16bit mono.
For music, I’ve been using Audacity to compress original files to WMA 44100hz, 64kbps with very good results and relatively small files, but still I have over 20mb of tracks - what are you doing to get your whole game under 4mb especially regarding music files?
“Komag” wrote:
- Option to see how much memory every channel is taking up, how much they have left, etc, just a simple memory management option.
Local storage is just a cache, so there’s not much meaning to the concept of “space left”. For example, it’s impossible to run out of channel storage space. At the least it would be hard to present this in a way that end users would understand it.
–Mark
“RokuMarkn” wrote:
“Komag” wrote:
- Option to see how much memory every channel is taking up, how much they have left, etc, just a simple memory management option.
Local storage is just a cache, so there’s not much meaning to the concept of “space left”. For example, it’s impossible to run out of channel storage space. At the least it would be hard to present this in a way that end users would understand it.
Won’t make sense to show “space left” indeed.
But how about showing the channel bundle size (e.g. “Size: 0.7 MB” in channel info on the player and in the web store)?
iOS AppStore, Google Play store, Windows Phone store all do it. And Apple’s and Microsoft’s are two references i use as far as UX/usability goes.
I guess I don’t understand how each Roku’s “Memory” and “Channel Storage” works then. Most Rokus lately have 512mb memory and 256mb channel storage. How can the Roku never run out of channel storage space? Does the Roku “delete” channel files if the channel storage is full, and download files on-the-fly for the channel the user is trying to run?
So what would literally happen if 9 other developers and I each release a 40mb game and someone buys and installs all 10 of them, 400mb total? How about 50 such games, 2000mb total?
“Komag” wrote:
Does the Roku “delete” channel files if the channel storage is full, and download files on-the-fly for the channel the user is trying to run?
Yes, that’s what happens. Except it works at “bundle” granularity - i.e. deletes or downloads the whole package and not individual files from a package.
Hmm, so theoretically, if all channels were 50mb, the user would have just the 5 most recent channels currently downloaded, and if he wanted to open a 6th channel, the Roku would delete the bundle for the least-recently-opened channel, download the new one, and now once again have the 5 most recently opened channels on the Roku.
[upload|vLuHvTKBIPpXdy39xDh5+g==]
“RokuMarkn” wrote:
it’s impossible to run out of channel storage space.
I do understand what you are saying about the available load-at-runtime functionality making storage take on a different meaning.
…And I know this is apples and other kind of apples, but I did have to delete a bunch of channels to stop getting this message when trying to compile on my Roku 3.
[upload|9FfHZvxSjKvhKyyL1SYnKw==]
Brad, can you comment on this part?
“Komag” wrote:
“BradC” wrote:
I have an upcoming sidescroller game kuglo with a ton of music, fx, and gfx that’s around 4 megs, and again, a lot of work goes into keeping this file size to make sure users don’t get boned by installing my channel… (compression…)…I’m aware of compressing images, and mine are mostly tiny, but what about music and sfx?
For sfx, are you using something other than 44.1khz, 16bit mono? Are you just keeping the sounds very short/brief? I tried 22050hz 8bit mono files, 1/4 the size, and they played and sounded fine, but I’ve read I’m asking for trouble if I deviate from 44.1khz, 16bit mono.
For music, I’ve been using Audacity to compress original files to WMA 44100hz, 64kbps with very good results and relatively small files, but still I have over 20mb of tracks - what are you doing to get your whole game under 4mb especially regarding music files?
Audio that is mono is significantly smaller of course, with no real noticeable difference (this point is certainly arguable based on artistic perspective)
My music tracks are looping so they are fairly short without sounding short, most are under a minute. I’ve got most at 48kbs, but a couple compressed to 32 and still sounded good, and one only went to 64 before I could tell. About 100-200K per song. I have one thats still 800k that I haven’t optimized yet.
fx and music are still a big majority of filesize of course. I wish we could use other bitrates for samples for fx, that could save a lot. I do keep fx as short as I can, and will generally pick a smaller file when deciding between two samples that are otherwise comparable.
Really though, if the official roku view is that you don’t need to optimize, none of this matters much it’s just my own perspective and I guess it comes down to personal preference.
So I just got this message on the Development Application Installer page:
Warning: Application size prevents it from working on Roku 1 players (3215348 > 2097152).
What Roku 1 is it talking about? Talking about a 2mb limit there?
Wait… It looks like your game is 3mb? I thought it was 20?
you can ignore that, they don’t publish for roku1 anymore anyway.
I’m just testing with a couple of the sound files at this point.
“Komag” wrote:
What Roku 1 is it talking about? Talking about a 2mb limit there?
The Roku 1, in this case, are the legacy Rokus running 3.x firmware.
“BradC” wrote:
“RokuMarkn” wrote:
it’s impossible to run out of channel storage space.
I do understand what you are saying about the available load-at-runtime functionality making storage take on a different meaning.…And I know this is apples and other kind of apples, but I did have to delete a bunch of channels to stop getting this message when trying to compile on my Roku 3.
I wonder what happened in your case?
One theory is that the dev.installer does not flush anything from the LRU cache to make space.
I dunno but it’s crazy annoying.
The only way I know of to free up space so I can compile is to uninstall stuff, which of course takes the channels off all the rokus on my account.
“BradC” wrote:
I dunno but it’s crazy annoying.
The only way I know of to free up space so I can compile is to uninstall stuff, which of course takes the channels off all the rokus on my account.
Idea: pick ONE big channel you know. How do you know is big - i don’t know*, maybe by observing which ones have % progress shown on install. Install that channel - or if installed, launch it - to make sure is in the cache. Then delete it and you should have space for dev.installer, perhaps?
() hey, Roku - how about showing the bundle sizes in the “hidden screen” list of channels?
