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What an export weighs

What an export weighs

· 2 min read
Dragos
Balaur

balaur export reports what a pack weighs and takes bytes off it, all of it lossless: unreferenced assets dropped, PNGs re-encoded, fonts subset, WAV written as FLAC.

Where a pack's bytes are, and what lossless re-encoding takes off

Where the bytes are​

The editor's own pack, 2.1 MB: fonts 77%, scripts 22%, images 1%. The web runtime beside it is 17.9 MB.

What landed​

  • A report. balaur export prints the pack by section, by extension, its ten heaviest entries, and the assets nothing references. --report prints and writes nothing.
  • Strip. strip = true drops every asset no scene, asset document, script string literal or id:// reference names. Off by default; keep protects a path a script builds at run time.
  • Images. images = "smallest" keeps the smaller of the PNG optimiser and lossless WebP. A 512-pixel logo: 20.7 KB to 8.3 KB, same pixels. JPEGs are left alone.
  • Fonts. fonts = "subset" keeps the code points in the project's scenes and scripts, printable ASCII, and any font_ranges named for server text. One face: 421 KB to 92 KB. Kerning, ligatures and Arabic joining survive; font_keep ships a face whole.
  • Audio. audio = "flac": WAV as FLAC, lossless, about half the size.
  • Bitmap fonts. .fnt descriptors are in the pack's extension list; a game shipping one drew nothing before.

No mode changes an image's pixel dimensions: a sprite is sized from its header, so a re-encoded texture is the same sprite and the same world.

[export]
strip = true            # drop an asset no scene, script or keep glob names
keep = ["sfx/**"]       # ...except paths a script builds at run time
font_keep = ["fonts/ui-*"]  # ship these faces whole even when subsetting
images = "smallest"     # recompress PNG, or write lossless WebP, whichever wins
fonts = "subset"        # cut a face to the characters the project actually shows
audio = "flac"          # write uncompressed WAV as lossless FLAC

Not size levers​

  • Atlases: a few percent of the image bytes, and no draw-call win, since the renderer issues one call per node.
  • GPU-compressed textures (BC, ETC2, ASTC): a byte per pixel on disk, about twelve times the PNG. They cut video memory and upload time.
  • Compressing the pack: the media inside is already compressed, and static hosts gzip on the way out.

Build size is the manual page.