Loading slow / unresponsive?

[Rik]

I made my first MMF2 > SWF game recently, but for some reason while it's loading it hangs up the whole browser for a while. Once it's loaded and initialised it seems fine and everything returns to normal, but it's really disconcerting for the player. I couldn't find any previous posts about it, so I guess I'm doing something wrong?

I've tested it in multiple browsers and computers, so I think there is something up with the SWF rather than my setup (but anything's possible!)

Game's here for example

Many thanks in advance!

MFA here incase it's helpful to anyone's diagnosis (please excuse the messy code, it was made in 48 hours)!
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1534394/bootycall.mfa (22.7mb)

[Evilized79]

i can't really see any slowdowns, did you use any leaderboard functions with mochi, because that can give you some slowdowns.

[Rik]

No, there's no mochi or anything. If you try and scroll in the browser while the "Please Wait" loading screen's up, you should see what I mean - the game area stops refreshing (gets filled with junk) and the browser drops to really unresponsive refresh time. Does this on PC and Mac, Chrome and Firefox. Maybe it's not affecting everyone but someone even commented that it's not loading for them. Thanks for looking!

[Jeff]

I just played it in chrome and can't see any slowdowns.

[Rik]

Oh well, my PC is a bit slow, and Flash has never been great on a mac so I guess it could just be the setups I'm testing on - what's weird is the same thing happens when I load the SWF with Flash Player directly from the local computer. It locks up for a little while whilst it initialises. If nobody else has this problem I won't let it concern me too much, thanks all for looking!

[Jeff]

Well its a pretty big file isn't it?

Have you encountered any problem playing other flash games?

[JimJam]

Oh wow. Nice game! Love the art, music, everything.

I did notice some slowdown when loading the game. I'm using Firefox 3. The browser locked up for a second and didn't respond. But it was only literally a second long. Not a huge issue.

After looking at the game, I think this is probably because of the huge images you are using for objects. For instance the background is one (two?) huge object. I love that its all hand drawn, but even just cutting this image AS IS into 4 or 8 smaller rectangles would probably lower the filesize and save some loading time. I don't think MMF likes storing huge images in single objects. It seems to perform better with smaller ones.

I also notice that your collision actives are pretty big. I would suggest to use some more generic rectangles or slopes instead. Using many smaller objects repeated is much more efficient than one large one!

Other than that, great game. It was fun and simple. That song is really catchy too!

[Rik]

Thank you very much for the feedback, JimJam! I was under the impression lots of small objects would hurt flash since it has more to look after. But having one big object wasn't a design choice anyway, it was just to speed up development since I was under a tight deadline. I doubt I'll work like this again (with the huge bgs etc) so I won't let it concern me too much.

Thanks again!