ways to make it smaller?

The topic says it all.
I can't make my own graphics to play with in existing games, so I use other ships that I can find. In this instance, I took the Venerian Striker from Polycon and changed it from gold to white. As I was changing the file back to rled (I think Polycon only used rle8) I saw the 1296 sprites!

Obviously this took forever the Enrle to convert back to to a rled file. The end result was a 2mb file.

A 36 sprite file is obviously quite small.

As I am talking my way though this I am having an inkling of what I have to do but no idea where to start.

So, how do I cut a file down from 2mb.

My first guess is that it has to do with the Derled file and what it creates.

Even after so many years of owning this game, I am still a rank amateur.

Thanks for any help.

When you say 1296 sprites, I assume you mean frames. My first guess is human error when you created the sprite. As it happens, the square root of 1296 is 36, the correct number of frames. What program are you using to make the rlëD?

@darthkev, on 28 June 2014 - 01:56 AM, said in 1200+ sprites = very large plugin:

When you say 1296 sprites, I assume you mean frames. My first guess is human error when you created the sprite. As it happens, the square root of 1296 is 36, the correct number of frames. What program are you using to make the rlëD?

Well, I used DeRLE and EnRLE.
The first time I did this was a LOOONG time ago so I was going from what I had sitting around. The file contained a spin and a large pict file.

I just went into polycon now and found the rled file and the shan and ran those through DeRLE. I came up with a much smaller (i.e. fewer frames) file.

I have no clue why I started out with a spin file vs a shan.

I can work with this now.

I have no idea why I just didn't try this. I guess I just assumed that my past work was good.

And the only reason I tried was for this reply