Maximum Practical Size?

[Ninlhil]

I've got some plans forming, but one piece of info I haven't really been able to figure is the largest practical dimensions for sprites, particularly common ones. Like I know the basic Sergeant sprite is 55 pixels tall and there are others that are larger than that, but as resolution goes up, the dimensions go up and I'm wondering if there is a threshold for that.

[wildweasel]

This is gonna sound like a cop out answer, but "it depends."

There's a lot of factors that can drive how large your sprites can/should be. ZDoom based ports can Scale sprites to whatever size you want, through various methods, meaning there is no practical maximum size per sprite. You can even adjust the player's view height, which would allow even unscaled sprites to be taller without having to adjust the scale.

The real "practical" limits you're going to run into are with memory. This might not even be a problem either for 95 percent of use cases, but if you're trying to create something like Total Chaos that uses high resolution Everything, you may well start to see large amounts of huge sprites begin to cause some lag as they all load. But even this requires some extreme cases before it'll bog down the game.

[Ninlhil]

Thanks for the insights.