Causes of slowdown

[stuckboy]

Hi,

My game is running quite slowly at the moment, and I don't know why. I've optimised all my code within reason, but the other day I tried disabling all code and there is still something causing a fair amount of slowdown!

I disabled all the fancy graphical effects so I don't think it can be anything to do with that. Maybe it is just due to the fact there is a large number of objects in the frame?

I'm not exactly sure though, I was just wondering if anyone could give me some kind of a list of things other than code that can cause slowdown.

[Brandon]

It could be extra looping or a repeating action that shouldn't be repeating. Try adding "Only one action when event loops" to some repeating events and see if that alleviates the slowdown. Or you can take key events which you think are causing it and add Never to the top and test it.

[Paul_Boland]

How many Active Objects are on screen at any given time? A lot can indeed cause slowdown.

[z33z]

.. and how large are the active objects? And inc effects?

[stuckboy]

There can be as little as 5 objects onscreen and the slowdown still occurs. I have disabled most of the graphics heavy features for the time being but it still runs quite slowly.

I've done another few tests just now and I've discovered something of interest: When I activate the "slow motion" feature of my game, the object count climbs at a fairly constant (and quick!) rate. After about a minute of slowmotion the object count will have risen to about 5000.

Whats interesting about this is that when I check the list of objects using the debugger, there aren't 5000 objects in there! So either MMF is telling me porky pies or theres some kind of invisible object being created.

This isn't anything to do with the fact that slowmo changes the games frame rate, since I tried disabling the relevent events and it still did it.

[MechatheSlag]

Demo or it didn't happen.

[00J]

Aw this is for The Orphanage, this has to be resolved... heh

-Have you updated to the lastest Build yet? Has this started since Build 248? I'm using Build 247 still.

-Someone else was complaining about this mystery object bump. I suggested Checking all Layers and looking for embedded code that may be "hanging" around, I don't know why but I get this image of the layers far way from the front end of the MMF runtime, and I really only use them for objects with no code. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with the layers but I found out that collision detection doesn't work over layers.

This idea is probably way out there, since I have no clue how the Layering and Parallax are programmed. [laugh]

-When ever I get a continuous object increase, I check all the destroy/inactivate/keep active if too far from play field checkbox states.

-Fiddle with Load on Call, Create at Start, Destroying objects by there animation being finished. <- I actually had to change this from If Animation is Stopped Destroy object to If Objects Motion is Stopped Destroy Object a while ago for Gunball to make definately sure no stray objects would grow out of control and eat memory.

-Oh yeah one more thing, Check your Blood Splats make sure that if your killing the Active Blood Splat and Adding an image of it to the backdrop that it is indeed doing that, and not spawning like a million blood splats and not killing the first ones.

Whats interesting about this is that when I check the list of objects using the debugger, there aren't 5000 objects in there! So either MMF is telling me porky pies or theres some kind of invisible object being created.

-Hmm have you tried setting the Object limit to 300? MMF just won't create any objects over 300, so the invisible objects should be manageable.

-Also the Slow mo could be making MMF unable to keep up destroying something, like a Smoke particle or something that needs MMF to actually run fast enough to destroy the objects.

Especially if they fade out.

[stuckboy]

No I haven't updated yet... I did a really stupid thing! I'm home from uni for christmas and I left my MMF2 disk in my room at uni! So obviously when hardware acceleration comes out at christmas I'll have to wait until the middle of january before I can try it!

I'm not actually using layers at all. I tried it once for a psuedo reflection effect and it mucked up all of my collisions (started flagging the blood spatter backdrops as obstacles for some reason).

I found out to some extent what was causing the object increase in slowmo. I deleted the bullet and explosion distortion effects (lens object) completely from the game and now it doesn't do it. I was going to do this anyway since I will be converting the game to use HWA as soon as I get my hands on it. My guess is that this was just a bug with the lens object.

I'm hoping that when HWA is implemented the game will run smooth as a button, because I really want this game to run at full 52fps on a half decent system, otherwise the aiming is made difficult and the whole "intense action" factor is lost.

[stuckboy]

Oh one other thing, I remember there was a memory leak with the advanced direction object, which I am making heavy use of. Yves gave a me a fixed version, but maybe it updated back to the old version at some point?