delayed download of a layout?

Hi, if a game has say 10 layouts, are they all loaded before the game starts, even if some will never be used?

To support mobile, I am looking at one strategy which is to have 10+ layouts for different screen sizes and orientations.   Will they all be downloaded, even if not used? IS there a way to change this behavior (e.g. test the screen size & features, then only load the required layout)

If the layouts all use the same objects (e.g. the sprites are simply copied across all layouts, with different positions), what are the overheads in terms of:

1) download size

2) perfomrnace? E.g. if you animate a sprite, will it animate on all 10 layouts, even if only one layout is active?

Thanks,

All layouts are downloaded at the start of the game. There is no performance overhead in regards to the amount of layouts present.

If your layouts use the same graphics, you shouldn't be too concerned. There will be very little memory and no performance overhead.

That being said, to maintain your sanity, I would stick with one layout which works for all resolutions. The letterbox scale fullscreen option helps tremendously.

Thanks sqiddster this is a big help.

However, for mobile, letterbox scale full screen is not acceptable by any of our customers. We are struggingly to find any way to use C2 to produce a mobile version which will work with multiple mobile screen sizes without the black bars. We thougth the answer was to use crop then do the proportional scaling manually then add some floating buttons, but crop mode screws up the text and renders it unreadable on FF and Chrome(IE is ok). Bug raised.

The only way to suport serveral mobile sizes without black crop bars we can see is to create many serparate games, one for each size (about 40 in total), or create many layouts, most with different images in differnet sizes and pick the right one (which is going to be big and slow to download)

I am guessing that noone has used C2 to produce a multi-handset mobile game without big black bars.