What are some ways to reduce lag?

[Jocastus]

Maybe it's just my own inexperience, but every time I make a game with MMF2, I have to work really hard to avoid obvious lags in gameplay.

Sometimes it's too many active objects or too many layers, but seriously, I'm using only a small fraction of the resources that a professional game might, so what gives?

Why can't I have more than a dozen or so enemies on a frame with maybe 5 layers before my framerate drops to about half speed?

Is there something obvious I'm just not getting? I swear, even other users of MMF2 seem to have less trouble with this than me.

[DavidN]

That does sound like a strangely low number of things you're doing before you get slowdown... can you describe roughly what you're doing with it, though? Any complex fastlooping or scaling/angle changing?

If many collisions and general game events happen on a layer above 1, you may get slowdown from that, because the collision mask for layers above 1 have to be calculated in realtime.

You could try using the hardware-accelerated runtime (see the HWA forum) to see if that helps.

[Jocastus]

Alright here's what I've been doing lately: http://www.mediafire.com/?iytld22xfdm

Please bear in mind that this is just a couple frames of testing for a potential game, so there's lots to be finished or deleted. Consider this a brainstorming space--even the sprites are mostly just placeholders.

To play:
Press the arrows to move.
1 2 3 and 0 re-size the screen.
Esc exits.
F2 restarts.

Open up the debug window while you play and watch the Frame rate drop from about 60 to about 30.
There's another frame to the west of the start point, which is pretty empty and runs more smoothly, so you can compare.

There are global events, frame events, and most moving objects have events in them too, if you're trying to find my code.

Anything you can point out would help a great deal.

[Fimbul]

No slowdown here.
Running on standard.

Are you sure you have the latest version of MMF?
Latest version of all extensions?

Nothing hogging up all the memory in your computer?

How much RAM do you have? What Operating System?

[Jocastus]

Running version 248 on Vista on my laptop. 2GB RAM.

[Jacob]

No Slowdown here, 249 Windows 7 4GB RAM

[Fimbul]

try updating to v249. See if that fixes your problem.

[Jocastus]

Alright, I'll not worry about it for now. If I ever finish a game that people complain is too slow, then I'll re-visit the issue. Thanks.

[uprize]

You probably have a slow computer. Time for an upgrade.