Random Performance Issues (Frame Drops!)

Hi guys!

It's me again. I know this issue has been discussed already, but there was no solution given besides "turn V-sync on", which I did, but the problem still exists. I was in contact with Yves via email about this, but more then "no idea, must be Windows" wasn't the response, which is not helpful for me. As Yves has acknowledged, this seems to be an issue with MMF2 (or Windows...?) and not a problem of my events. Hence I am not able to fix this on my own! Hence I'm making this thread ;)

If you don't know what I mean, please take a look at my example:
http://www.gungirl2.com/stuff/FrameSkipTest.mfa

When you test it, simply push left and right to scroll the screen. At random intervals, the performance will drop without a reason and the frames will start stuttering. As Yves told me this might be only a problem with Windows or my computer. So I've turned Vsync on, compiled the application and took it over to several friends. The result is that on EVERY computer, no matter the operating system or system spec, the game had temporarily notable performance issues, sometimes more than 10 seconds long framerate drops to 15-20.

I know it's important to you guys to develop more and more new stuff like ios, xbla, flash and MMF3, but please Clickteam I urge you to take a serious look at this performance problem as it's really annoying to see a game this simple stuttering on high end machines. It's also embarassing when friends ask me what causes the game to lag if even Crysis2 is no problem for his machine.

And please don't tell me it's Windows' fault as Windows is obviously capable of rendering much more complicated software at steady framerate without problems.

Sorry I don't want to sound angry but this problem is annoying the hell out of me and there is no fix in sight on the horizon, which seriously concerns me.

Have you tried to select V-Sync and set the frame rate to a slightly higer version, e.g. 75? It seems I can't reproduce the problem with these values.

As you've set the frame rate to 60 and the Windows timer is not very precise, perhaps sometimes the MMF2 runtime thinks you've missed the current vertical blank and waits for the next one.

Yes, Vsync is definitely on.

I've tried setting the framerate slightly higher, but that did not fix the issue. Even with framerate set to 100 I experience lags.

Odd.
I am running it on kinda my old junker computer
Windows vista maybe 4 years old nothing special video card wise.

MMF build 253
I added a frame rate counter on the screen and the thing stays a pretty much rock solid 60-59 FPS

Apparently this issue does not show up on framerate counters, because the issue happens somewhere between the application and where directX is drawing the screen. Or something.

So just keep trying the app and in theory I will see it slow down?

I saw a little jitter in the diamonds
Then I turned off detect the collisions outside the window and that went away.

Edit -- odd when my computer was doing something else in the background the jitter happened again so I don't know.

Does this bother nobody else? Am I the only one who experiences these weird "jitters"? I imagine this issue would be very bad for high velocity games like space shooters or something. Am I the only one who has this problem? It's not a problem of my computer, because other computers show the same issues. It can't be Windows, because Windows does not have problems running other software at steady framerate on my computer. Even my previous game GunGirl2 has no framerate issues whatsoever. Maybe it's my MMF2 installation? Should I make a clean install of the program and see if that fixes anything? Could the mfa file be corrupted because I have a broken MMF2 version? I have it on my hard drive for over a year, only installing new updates when they come out, never uninstalled it. Could a clean installation solve the problem?

I'm sorry, but I want to have a smooth and steady framerate in my game because it has pretty low resolution and every little jitter looks like an earthquake. I really have to find a solution for this :(

This problem is weird. I've seen lots of much more complicated HWA apps that work flawlessly. Last week I've tried to recompile the MMF2 D3D engine with a different version of the DirectX SDK and apparently I can still reproduce the problem, so it's not the version we use.

It's not your MMF2 installation either, as I can reproduce it sometimes on my machine (it takes ages sometimes to reproduce it...).

I don't think the MFA is corrupt, it's very simple.

I've to make specific routines to profile your application, that will take some time...

Thank you, Yves! I'm sorry that I'm bothering you so much with this, but this issue is driving me crazy. After taking apart my whole game engine for several days and spending so much time figuring out what could cause this, it's very good to hear that I'm not insane and someone else is trying to help me eliminate this problem from my game. I appreciate that very much :)

There is some chop on this, isn't there?
It seems to relate to the length of time that you scroll left or right without stopping.
I think there's something 'piling up' behind the scenes.

I would think that this has to be connected to the fact that you're using layers with HWA. I thought the advice was not to use layers at all with HWA but that could have been something that only applied during HWA Beta. I read that ages ago.

I also had it doing the same thing everyone else saw. Jitters in the diamonds. I set line one and 2 instead of +6 and -6 on the cemera X postion,.I set it to +2 and -2. I didn't get any jitter at all for a few minutes,..then it came back? Weird! So,.I checked V-Sync and it went away. My refresh rate is 60 Hertz and the frame rate of you app is 60. I have no clue why this would be doing this, but turning on V-Sync cured it for me.

Can I ask why the background objects can't be moved/deleted. I click on them and nothing happens? I even tried "unlock all"

Cos they're in other layers.
You gotta have the layers toolbar up and click on the appropriate layer before you can nuke em.

Thanks Crash86, Never used layers?

I always thought I'd read that they had quite a big performance overhead in HWA.
I have 2 layers in my mission briefing and the CPU usage is massive, lol.

Blue66, have you had any luck getting feedback?

I also have this problem, and like you it is driving me nuts. Only occurs in windowed mode for me, and when I turn V-Sync on (in game) it's actually worse. Tried all suggested solutions but no luck. Fullscreen is fine though.

My rig is q6600, 6GB ram, gtx580, Windows 7 64bit.

Blue66, I have the same issue when v-sync is turned off but not when it's turned on and all I have to use right now is a **** netbook that is possibly dying on me soon.

Try making the active object you use inactive when far away from screen.
It works fine for me when I changed it.

I think the problem lies in the devlopers code, for some reason it will handle a huge chunk of data perhaps during one clock cycle and makes you drop in frames.

Seeing how it doesn't display on a frame counter is probly because it refreases so fast you wont notice it.

Edit: i got a similer problem wiht one of my games. I fixed it by making sure i didn't have to many active objects in the frame.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Corlen

Blue66, I have the same issue when v-sync is turned off but not when it's turned on and all I have to use right now is a **** netbook that is possibly dying on me soon.

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Really sorry for necrobumping an old thread, but I just found out some jitters that occured every 3-10 seconds were fixed by turning on v-sync, so I thought it might be useful to mention if anyone else was having trouble.