Post-Mortem (mostly) on huge project

Artwork
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Hi everyone. I am most of the way through finishing a huge project in aseprite, and I would consider it a pretty fair stress test. Here’s some system info:

~30 gigs of ram (technically 32, 30 after system usage)
Linux Mint
AMD Ryzen 5 3600 (this doesn’t matter, it barely ever hits CPU)
Radeon RX 570

So the picture is 2016x2016 pixels, I think it is 27 layers, and the final animation is, uhh… 359 frames for around a 30 second animation. You can see that here: https://gibson.show/bganimation.gif

I still need to animate some stuff, most conspicuously the dragon and the flying windmill things. The context of this is as a background for my album release, you can see where that would fit in here: https://bardchords.com

At its most animated state, this is 26.3 gigs in ram. I originally planned it at more frames, but my computer could not handle it. Notice the CPU use in that image- negligible.

image
image1107×533 82.2 KB

Considering what I have been doing, there have been relatively few crashes. I used TekF’s parallax script extensively for this project, and it would not have been possible without it. I can get more into what I like and dislike about the program in later posts, and I will post the finished image, but I wanted to let people know the most basic logistics of doing a project like this.

This is somewhere around 200 hours of work, just on this image. People code and release video games in that much time, so I am not a paragon of wisdom. However, I have accrued experience with this program people might find useful, so if this inspires any questions please ask away.

Real quick strengths of aseprite:
Palette control
Tiling feature
It runs lean
Easy hotkeys/simple interface
I cannot script, but the script I found for parallax was absolutely essential

Weaknesses:
Selection can be weird and counterintuitive (I understand this is the hardest thing to get right, and is mostly up to preference)
I want palette cycling support that’s a little smoother than the assigned-number method (I understand this is an upcoming feature)

As I finish the projects I am making these assets for, I plan on releasing them for public use, commercial or non-commercial, but I am not quite there yet.

Thanks!

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Here’s an update. I’ve animated it to be much smoother, and I have the whole loop. I slowed down the clouds by breaking the project into two halves, so about 50 gigs of project files total. I have made the windmills hover and the dragon fly around. Both the top image and the background are now the same animated image. I ended up changing the export size to 87.5% (7/8) of the original, and I did not really notice the quality drop.

https://bardchords.com

I have noticed this site does not work great in safari. Here is the background image alone:

I realize there’s probably a discord where most of the aseprite action is, but hopefully this is useful to people considering a large project.

This program is excellent. I would not have aimed so high if it was not so easy to use, and once I got to the point where I realized there might be some serious logistical issues in rendering what I wanted, I was still able to use the program to get my desired results.

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