Ok, so I'm trying to trim down the size of my game's SWF. I have a number of scrolling backgrounds that are meant to be out-of-focus silhouettes with things behind them, so I originally brought them into Stencyl as PNG-24s, since I need the transparency to have soft edges. These worked nicely.
Thinking they were probably having a negative effect on my file size, though, I came up with an idea - I could replace them with grayscale JPEGs that would serve as the alpha channels, and then work a little magic with them at runtime to generate the colored silhouettes. The JPEGs are 10-12 times smaller than the PNGs, so I figured I'd realize a significant savings.
Before digging into the code, though, I did a quick test. I published two SWFs - one using the PNGs and one using the grayscale JPEGs. To my bafflement, the one with the JPEGs ended up being a slightly *larger* file than the one with the PNGs.
So my question here is this: does the file size of the source images not matter once they're imported into Stencyl? Is it just the raw number of pixels that determines how much heft a particular graphic adds to the SWF? Or am I possibly missing something somewhere? If it isn't obvious, I'm somewhat new to this, so any advice on optimizing my graphics for file size is welcome.
Thanks in advance!