Managing resources in a universal ios app

Question

I am developing a cocos2d game. I need to make it universal. Problem is that I want to use minimun amount of images to keep the universal binary as small as possible. Is there any possibility that I can use same images I am using for iphone, retina and iPad somehow? If yes, how can I do that? What image size and quality should it be? Any suggestion?

Thanks and Best regards

Answer 1

As for suggestions: provide HD resolution images for Retina devices and iPad, provide SD resolution images for non-Retina devices. Don't think about an all-in-one solution - there isn't one that's acceptable.

1. Don't upscale SD images to HD resolution on Retina devices or iPad. It won't look any better.

2. Don't downscale HD images for non-Retina devices. Your textures will still use 4x the memory on devices that have half or even a quarter of the memory available. In addition, downscaling images is bad for performance because it has to be done by the CPU on older devices. While you could downscale the image and save the downscaled texture, it adds a lot more complexity to your code and will increase the loading time.

Answer 2

There's not a single right answer to this question. One way to do it is to create images that are larger than you need and then scale them down. If the images don't have a lot of fine detail, that should work pretty well. As an example, this is the reason that you submit a 512x512 pixel image of your app icon along with your app to the App Store. Apple never displays the image at that size, but uses it to create a variety of smaller sizes for display in the App Store.

Another approach is to use vector images, which you can draw perfectly at any size that you need. Unfortunately, the only vector format that I can think of that's supported in iOS is PDF.