Firstly and most obviously, changing the dimentions of the files. Some people use 1024px x 1024px files or bigger. This is really quite unnecessary. 512 x 512 should be the max size. The tail can be even smaller, perhaps 128 x 128. You can draw as the high resolutions but try and re-size down for the final product. Why should the eyeballs need the same size texture as the entire body?PNGThe next common issue is the use of .png's. I know why you all like to use .png's; they store the entire image exactly as the original was with a reasonable file size. Only there are ways to make it far smaller. So lets start with a body .png.Heres our original a fairly normal body texture. 512 pixels square. It's current size is 339KBSticking with pngs as they are needed if you want to use transparency.Lets start by indexing.Open the index dialogue as followsSet the "max colors" to 255 and go to File>ExportOnce saved, we now have thisThis is only 146KB so we've more than halved the size of the preset. Can you really see the difference? All we've done is reduce the number of colours this method won't work so well for a rainbow preset with lots of different colours. But most presets use varying shades of 1 or 2 colours.Using the same method we can reduce the pallet further this time. I used 128.So we've halved the palette again but this time we only shrank to 119KB. Still a saving but you might find its not worthwhile for you.The rest of this guide will cover non-transparent textures only. (Note: if you not using alpha_blend as your transparencey method you can still use these).
