Any advice would be highly appreciated!
I made an animated l watch that I published that works great - It's goal based, has 10 crisp static backgrounds (PNGs), has 21 small sprites (PNGs) and uses a .png font instead of my usual vector font. Super Fancy, its 2.7 MB - runs on about 15/123.9 kB memory (measused on simulation for a Venu S2).
I have no layouts, no strings, or any calls to anything but a single drawables.xml. Everything is run and formatted manually in view.mc for each watch with if/else statements. The watch runs on the normal second refresh only with Burn Protection, and it doesn't call any animation layers (No Monkey Motion) or use high power. It's manually animated by using seconds%2 to hunt down bitmaps out of long arrays to make the animations a no-cost flickering loop.
I wanted to improve the watch further by adding an animated background in an update. I doubled the backgrounds and set them to flicker, so now there are 21 sprites and 21 backgrounds. I used .jpeg instead of .png to try to reduce file size, but the file ended up being 4.7 MB which is HUGE. I'm surprised it even was able to download a demo version. (Fitbit won't even accept a watchface bigger than 3 MB- they can barely download at 1.2MB, so I was impressed with Garmin)
The 4.7MB watch worked great on my simulation.( It was still running at 15.7/123.9kB) but practically broke my real device. I've never seen my watch freeze up like this.
First it really struggled and glitched all day just trying to get the demo version. Then when it finally uploaded it didn't crash, but it was mostly frozen. It seemed to refresh every minute, instead of second.
Obviously since it is a disaster, I am just not release any updates on my already working watch.
Do you think 4.7 MB or 5MB is the file size limit on a Garmin?
Anyone have experience with huge watch file sizes?
Thank you!
(I'm using a Venu S2 and I am only publishing to watches with Version 5 of the API.)
