Comment 0 for bug 1121982

The game currently requires a lot of video memory to store all the animation frames of in-game objects.

In many cases, there is a lot of redundancy in those frames. For example. the barbarian headquarters animation has 20 frames, each of size 120x120, adding up to 288000 pixels or slightly more than 1MB of video memory. However, those frames differ only by the fairly small animation of the building's flags.

It could be quite beneficial to extract one base texture plus difference images. In the case of the barbarian headquarters, this could probably get video memory consumption down to about 40000 pixels or around 160kB, an improvement by a factor 6. Admittedly, this particular example is probably one of the cases that would benefit most, but the concept seems worthy of investigation.

Any implementation would have to be as transparent as possible, and should especially avoid putting any additional work on the graphics developers.