Tiny images, mega headache

[David Kwinter]

I'm in the middle of making a map-editor for a new 2-D game. It's a grid of
8x8 pixel tiles, designed to fill a 1024,768 screen. Each tile can be one of
28 different images.

There are 96 columns and 128 rows.

On both my 667mhz G4 and 1.9ghz Pentium 4 the following repeat, designed to
set each tile to the default "water" background, stalls about 70% of the way
through.


 repeat with y=1 to 96
    lock screen
    repeat with x=1 to 128
          
      put x&"c"&y into iName
      set the fileName of image iName to pgmRootDir&"images/water.png"
     
      if the capslockkey=down then exit repeat
    end repeat
    unlock screen
    if the capslockkey=down then exit repeat
  end repeat


True, there are 12,288 separate images, but c'mon we're talking 1.9ghz
w/800mhz Rambus here!

The images are 3,700 bytes. I've got 256mb ram. I notice my WinXP page file
balloons to 700MB before it stalls. On the Mac I just get the spinning
lollipop of death.

Any tips, tricks, techniques?


David Kwinter