I think the limits now are 1MB for the Fill, Fog & Board each.  For Fill and Fog this is plenty, but when you have to save Board maps as 24-PNG for transparency, that 1MB can get hit pretty quickly.  Especially if you are using fancy textures, etc.   I've got one map now that came out as 1.25MB.  I smoothed out some textures, tried SuperPNG, and simplified in a few other ways and got it down to 1.02MB...

Would it be too much of a strain on the servers to bump up the Board image to a max of 1.5MB?  Or alternatively, how about a 3MB max (or even 2MB max) on the total of all 3 boards.  That way, I could simplify my Fill map to make a bit more room for the board image.

if your fill is over 100kb you're doing something very wrong.  The fog is a different story because you can incorporate texture and multicolor, I've got several fog images that are 300+kb.

As to the board image there are a number of things you can do.  If you have Photoshop+Fireworks(or just Fireworks or any program that can do PNG8 with Alpha) you can save images as PNG8 with Alpha Transparency to dramatically reduce file sizes with minimal quality reduction.

You can also "posterize" a PNG24 image in most image editing applications.  It basically reduces the number of colors used in your image and produces smaller file sizes.  If you do it too much your image will look cartoony so be careful.

I feel your pain though, my Stargate Atlantis board image is 991kb.  It is PNG 24 though, I was going to convert it to PNG8 but it took a little too much of the clarity away for my liking.  I have however saved  several of my other maps board images using PNG8.

Anyone else got any tricks?

I think the 1MB works, if it was bumped to 1.25 or 1.5 I would guess there would be a board that is 1.26 or 1.51 and then people would want it even higher.  I have yet to have a board that I've been unable to get under the 1MB limit (I've got to 1020 KB I think, the limit is really 1024KB). 

OptiPNG works pretty well for bringing the size down some.  If I still need it lowered, then I'll add a layer of a solid color for the board image (in the non-fill areas) and set it to highly transparent so that it only slightly affects the image but helps reduce the image size (by reducing the color palette perhaps?).

Fill image should be very small as it should only contain the fill territories, everything else gets cut out/thrown away in the Flash Player.  So don't put board image stuff on your fill image.

Same goes for Fog image, although it can be a bit higher in size, but I would still be surprised if it got too close to the 1MB limit without an easy fix.

That's my thoughts anyways :).

I've had a problem with the optimizer plug-ins killing my transparent areas -- is there a good way around this?

You might try some of the information from these links.  I haven't personally used either but it sounds like they may work.

http://www.ethanandjamie.com/blog/81-png8-transparency-without-fireworks

http://smush.it/

With the board image caching it's not so much of a problem as the image is only loaded once. But I do agree with Yertle, whatever the limit is someone will be wanting it higher!

If it's genuinely too restrictive for a few developers then perhaps the bar should be raised.

Thanks for all the suggestions.  I'm working my way through them.  Saving as PNG8 didn't work for me, because it seems to use only a single bit for transparent, so everything was either fully transparent, or fully opaque and it looked like crap.  Maybe that is a limitation of the app I am using (Photoshop CS2).

I also tried OptiPNG, but the resulting PNG was actually bigger (I used optimization level 9).

My fill image is only 35K, no fog image (yet - maybe later).

Kjeld - SuperPNG via photoshop and OptiPNG post-processing both kept my transparent areas.  I remember previously trying some things and it not working right, and I think it was because I was saving as PNG8 (which as I mentioned above can sometimes ruin your transparency).

I did try posterizing, and I was able to crank that up enough to reduce the image size to 921K, without it looking too bad.  But this was after I smoothed my textures a lot before, so I'm going to go back and try it with the pre-smoothed textures and see if it is still under 1MB.

I haven't gotten to Viper's links yet.  Maybe tomorrow.

If it's not a big increase in load to the server, then my vote is for Tom to go ahead and increase the limit.  Sure whatever he increases it to, someone will find it too small, but I still think 1MB is just a bit too small now that we have the board/fill distinction.  I think 1.5MB (just for board images) should be enough to make me happy.  You could even bring the fill image limit down to compensate.  I don't see why anyone would need more than 100k for that.

Ozyman wrote:but I still think 1MB is just a bit too small now that we have the board/fill distinction.  I think 1.5MB (just for board images) should be enough to make me happy.  You could even bring the fill image limit down to compensate.  I don't see why anyone would need more than 100k for that.

Try a 100k limit (with a secret of actually going to 500k)... oooh that's what tom should do, raise it to 1.25MB but don't actually show it anywhere and just let it "be known" .

I'm not too sure it's compensating by bringing the fill image limit down either, since no one is (or should be anyway) coming close to that limit.

The PNG8 optimizations are unfortunately only built into Adobe Fireworks.  Photoshop will not save properly as PNG8 with Alpha transparency.

I tried out the pngquant optimizer, works pretty well though not a whole lot of savings over GIMP's standard level 9 compression without severe loss of transparency quality.

If it was increased I'd say put it up to 1.5MB for now - I don't have huge concern about doing this, it's in your browser cache so it won't result in slowdown other than the initial board load.

1.5MB would certainly open up some more board image options, though at some point a hard line needs to be drawn.

I've bumped it up to 1.5MB (exactly 1572864 bytes).

Awesome...I am adding texture layers to my Pangea map right now.

The board designer is still preventing me from uploading a file larger than 1024 KBytes.

Ah yes, there is a second check. Apologies, this will need to wait until the Factory / Barren territory update to the designer. ETA is another week, sorry.

Well im glad i havent uploaded any maps yet. I've had several i designed but couldn't get them small enough with out posterizing them or cutting them down. And a lot of them were 1.3Mb!!! So this is a tad frustrating since i spent so long looking for options to get sizes down, and now that i have no time left for map making it goes up haha. I'm glad it is happening though.

In case you had not checked the announcements thread the 1.5MB limit is now live.

Already, updated my Pangea board with the new image.  Thanks