Nimtrix yeah, my background is as a developer so I am just used to going that route first. Though if you did it based on a percentage of the window like the halfway point, etc... then it would work across multiple resolutions as well. Not sure if the overhead of an extra calculation would offset the extra object or not though resource wise.

Nimtrix Right, that should fix it according to the documentation. Another way would be to use variables and base it off of the viewport or window as they are rectangles you may be able to just use the size to figure out where to tile it, etc... though that may get complicated if you are publishing to multiple sizes. Basically calculate where the tiles should begin instead of sticking them to another invisible sprite.

One thing to also check if you look at Construct Dudes videos on youtube is that he has one where he talks about publishing an MS Market game and which countries to leave out if you want it to go through quicker.

Nimtrix For VRAM yes, because VRam is based on how many pixels of the screen are being rendered, not on the size of the file/object in memory. So a 1 pixel .png stretched across the whole screen will use very little system memory but still the whole screen worth of video memory unfortunately. If you stretch a 1px image across the whole visible screen, you are stretching it across however many pixels the screen resolution is using and it has to hold the color value for each pixel on the screen in memory. Kind of sucks.

I am currently working on a game for both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 so am having to juggle constantly if I want to keep both versions as similar as possible.

You can also use the preserve option to keep the state of objects in a layout so they remain how they were when you return to that layout.

The size of the object is different than the amount of video memory that is used. On a mobile platform you get overdraw if you render more than about 3 time the number of pixels on the screen. This is true regardless of the actual size of the graphic. This is about how many of the pixels on the screen are being drawn and how many times per tick.

A one pixel tiled image, still uses all the pixels of the screen if you tile it across the whole thing, so while the object itself uses hardly any memory, your video memory is using a lot as it is storying the value of each pixel rendered. Overlapping this with another object increases the video overhead for rendering the screen.

So regardless of tiled vs. sprites, the video memory is based on pixels rendered, not on the size of the object being used to draw them. Two different areas of memory.

You can refer to the following threads for more info, also here is a quote on the mobile overdraw issue:

Mobile overdraw

While we're on the subject of mobile limitations, it's worth mentioning some mobile devices can only draw each pixels 3 times per frame and still reach 60 FPS. In other words, if you have four window-sized images on screen, you cannot reach 60 FPS on such a device. (Note Construct 2 renders scenes from the back to the front, so four overlapping objects are all still rendered.) Perhaps surprisingly, this includes transparent pixels. The GPU processes the full rectangle of a texture regardless of the content, and a transparent pixel still uses up your drawing budget, so four window-sized transparent images would still not reach 60 FPS. Similarly with memory usage, this is a device hardware limitation and you'll have the same limitation with any framework.

The solution here is again to prefer using small images instead of large ones. A large image will eat up lots of the mobile's drawing budget in one go, whereas it's easier for it to render several spread out smaller objects. For example, a window-sized sprite to add borders round the edge of the screen is very inefficient, since the transparent pixels in the middle still use up the draw budget; using four separate sprites for each edge of the screen would be a lot faster.

You can find more about properly composing your backgrounds here:

The "Right" Way to do backgrounds in C2

And Ashley's blog post where the quote was taken from:

Remember not to waste your memory

For the actual drawing of the sprites I use Adobe Illustrator (CS6, CC), Inkscape (Free), and once in a great while if really needed I use Adobe Photoshop or GIMP (Free). However lately Illustrator has become my main tool. And I have also found that if I take my work in illustrator (depending on the type of graphics being done) opening them in Adobe Fireworks and Exporting the PNG from there can save more room as well. Fireworks seems to have some better PNG compression than some of the other tools.

For actual animation of my sprites I use Spriter. You need to know that Spriter is not for drawing your characters. You draw their parts in another app like illustrator, then save them as separate files and then import them into spriter and put them together and animate them. You then have the option based on your preferences to export the animation frames as PNG files which can be imported as frames into C2, or export the whole animation as an .scml file which C2 can support using the Spriter plugin.

Nimtrix doesn't that mean you are also now using double the amount of pixels to do the same thing as the tiled background and the sprites both overlap eachother and even if transparent it still gets it's pixels rendered. Maybe not an issue on some platforms, but if you look to go mobile that could quickly cause performance issues. Just a thought...

Just a side note, please give more descriptive titles/subject lines to your posts. Not many people see a post called doubt and want to read it. If you called it falling blocks with physics, you would get a lot more people looking at this.

Nomad You need to use visual studio to package the app for the windows store and windows phone store.

The lumia 920, 928 and 925 are all 1280x768, if you go with 1200 you are going to get black lines as that is not the proper screen size.

with the free version you test in the browser on the devices. Check the preview over lan tutorial... you cannot export to the device exporters with the free version.