whenever a game has more than like 10 clips, exporting to html makes painfully huge files. for example, a relatively simple game i made was 8 mb, which is way too large. smartphone browsers won’t even open it, and even a macbook pro runs it very slowly. most posts on how to optimize html in wick tells me to convert all my clips to pngs because wick engine struggles to render svgs. however, even with a relatively small game, lets say 20 clips, of which 5 have two frame animations, that’s 25 svgs to convert to pngs. to convert to png, you have to (a) screenshot the clip (b) import it into a background remover software © add the png to your project, resize it, and with animated clips, import several frames. then, (d) the tedious part. all code has to be copy-pasted, in all the right scripts, and named correctly. all of this takes super long. a simple button to press that converts to png or jpeg or whatever would be very appreciated.
Hi, as a Candlestick contributor and knowing most of the gears inside Wick, you don’t need to PNGify your game.
For big games (20+ frames, 15+ clips), HTML export isn’t good. This is because HTML export just fits the entire .wick source file and runs it. The ZIP export is a better option, it puts the .wick file externally, and grabs it with fetch().
The real solution for big wick games is to use ZIP export or just figure out your own more ‘advanced’ format.
but what if i want to put my game in an html hosting website, like neocities?
Literally the only way to use ZIP exported games.
ZIP files are intended for sites such as itch.io (and actually, I think this is their preferred option). Other sites like Newgrounds and (presumably) Neocities should know what to do with ZIPs.
And yeah, ZIPs only work in cases like this. You can’t open them straight in the browser.
(I didn’t know they were actually faster, interesting)
They’re faster since the .wick file isn’t part of the document. The document won’t run until fully parsed and loaded.