Sprite Sheets: What is Considered Big/Too Many

The title pretty much sums it up (A fact of which I am rather proud, as this is unusual for my posts )

Theres a lot of explaining below but my questions in bold at the bottom if you want to skip it.

I am creating sprites for my game and I want them to be rather detailed. Right now, I am working with frames that are about 150x300 pixels.

The player can move the character in 8 directions (up, down, left, right and the 4 diagonals in between). We also want the player to be able to walk and run, and shoot while doing either. We have a stick figure walk cycle done, which will be the basis for all characters, and (remember this is just walking in all 8 directions) it consists of 80 frames.

Somehow I get the feeling that having multiple 1500x2400 px sprite sheets loaded at the same time (3 for each character, and this is a multiplayer game in which each character is unique) is going to put quite a load on a system.

Of course I have no frame of reference for this, which is why I am asking: What is considered a big sprite sheet and at that size what is considered too many?

 

There's no inherent load on the system aside from memory usage. There's no such thing as "too big" aside from hardware limitations (typically 4096x4096, which is the biggest Unity can import anyway), or "too many" aside from running out of VRAM.

--Eric

 

Thank you!
I guess my question was in relation to the average computer specs. Our target audience is college students. Its a LAN game that we see being played in kids basements/dorms. So Macbooks, and the equivalent windows laptops.

Another thing that would be helpful would be to explain how to figure it out. (Teach a man to fish hahaha)

 

See the memory consumption chart for textures here.

--Eric

 

Thanks again! and I'm gonna ask one more question.

I don't have an incredibly solid understanding of how memory works, so I want to make sure I understand how this works.

The example I provided above (1500x2400) would be roughly 6.8 Mb right?
And on a standard graphics card in a Macbook (GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB) around 149 sprite sheets of that size could be in use at once? (1024/6.8 - I'm assuming that the 1024MB is the VRAM)

 

It depends on the type of compression you use.

Less, since other things use VRAM (such as the display buffer).

--Eric

 

Oh, right, forgot to mention that I was calculating the size with RGBA 16bit on a standalone platform.

But that makes a lot of sense.

Thank you so much! That really helps me out a lot.

It also means that I can really keep going with my sprite's at the size they're at now. (6 characters x 3 sheets x 6.8 MB = only 61.2MB)