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After struggling with Render Images for a long time, I have a simple question...

Why use a Render Image?

What advantages does it have over simply rendering to a standard image? In fact, Standard images come with much less hassle than a render image, which seems to inherit a lot of it's properties from the screen buffer (e.g black lines where the screen is cropped).

what do you mean ? i can see alot of possibilites for it.

1. fake meshes - if you have 100 enemies running towards you
you need 100 3d meshes .. but wait .. no mobile can handle 100 enemies in high res right ? so .. instead of huge polygon count you simply place the enemy render it to an image and then present that image only then hide the 3d mesh..
so basicly you get about 5 (closest) enemies with real meshes and polygons..
while the other 95 are simply 3d planes with the animted textures of the same or some enemies the closer they get the more polygons will show until they are shown as the full mesh they are...

2. what about scenery ? all those trees and grass bushes etc... they can all act the same as the upper explained...

3. what about drawing some nice effects ? you can use one image to represent 2d particles or 3d particles obviusly 3d particles are a bit harder to create but they will still look the same if you use 2048x2048 rendered image.. so they look the same.. but with no 3d meshes again..

4. what about costumizations ? if you build a car game you can then paint on that car wheter you use a simple texture image where you know what goes where or if you paint directly on the car ..

actually wihtout RenderToImage AppGameKit will be very poor when it comes to tweaking alot of visual data.

One thing I'm planning on trying is using a render image in a shader - so for example a sprite could use a normal map to refract the rendered backdrop image. Could possible just duplicate sprites, render diffuse sprites on one render image, then normal map sprites on another, and combine them in a single sprite with a shader.

Really for me it's about making something that looks unique, has it's own style, and render images seem like a good way to achieve that.

Hmmm, from using render images so far I have had nothing but problems with them. They seem to work well apart from on Android and now and again issues on Windows.

This is including with shaders.

I am going to stay away from them in future if I can.

I think you missed my point...

Why use a Render Image?
What advantages does it have over simply rendering to a standard image?

I can use SetRenderToImage() and use a normal image. it seems this would have far less complications than a render image (although I haven't tried it yet).

Not sure if I am getting mixed up here with the problems I had with render images but I am sure it didn't work as expected when I tried to render to a normal image.
If I remember rightly, I am sure I even created a black image of size 800 x 600 with windows paint then loaded this in and tried to render to it but couldn't get it to work.

I maybe confusing this with a slightly mad dream though, will have to try it again!