Wish I knew of a better title, but the issue is rather specific.
So the producer of the game I'm working on has given me new animations to put in the game. I knew there might be issues right off when the new animations are 45mb when the originals were 1.7mb. This is a html5 browser game by the way.
Now a bit of history. What I have the engine do is cut up the spritesheets at load time into frames of canvas. Basically caching the animations beforehand so there's not need for computation while the game is running. Then I release the references to the spritesheet to be cleared by using ref = undefined; so the memory holding the big unused spritesheet images can be reclaimed.
And back on the story. The new animations crash the web browser at resource loading time. I assume it's taking up too much memory, and too fast for the garbage collector to catch up. As the only change made to the game between it working and not working were the new larger animations, I take that to mean the new animations are the problem. You can't push a web browser too hard as it is and the game is approaching 180mb with these new animations.
I then proceed to tell the producer that these animations are too big and to either slim them down or go back to the old animations(which looked fine enough to me). He claims that he got them down to 2mb and that it was still crashing for him. That doesn't sit well to me since he won't give it to me to test. Anyways, his prediction is it's just the pixel count that's causing the problem not the size of the images, and the size of the images doesn't matter. This doesn't sit well with me either. I'm not an expert on images but I have an idea on how they work and I'm pretty sure that's not it.
His solution is to join them all together into one giant massive image and have an xml file explain where the animations start and end. I've seen this before, so that's not a problem. It's that the resource manager doesn't do this, and I'd have to spend days on making this feature when I'm pretty sure it's not going to make a difference. Because if it's just a pixel count problem(like he says it is) then having one massive image won't fix that. It's the same surface area for the animations, just all together.
If there's someone out there with more knowledge on how images work and has stuck it out through the my long story, here's where I get to my question. Am I right in this issue that the problem is the size in mb of the images? Or, is the producer right that it's the amount of pixels and one giant spritesheet with all animations will fix our problem? By the way, this isn't a full game. It's a tech demo, that's past its set release date already by a week. The full game we'll work on later. Now I don't really care who's right in the end, as long as I know what I have to do to fix this.
Thank you