fast loops slowing game down

[brawltaunts22]

i have a fastloop going through every enemy on screen to test specific values based on their spread value. with 20 on screen there is no issue but once it starts looping through 30 the game starts to take a sharp decrease in speed and starts running at 25 frames per second. is there a way of looping through objects on screen to check a spread value to apply separate actions without slowing my game down? i want to at least be able to have 50 or 60 enemies without a decrease in speed.

[Fanotherpg]

Look over TDC for optimisation articles. If you can avoid spread value, as well.

[brawltaunts22]

Look over TDC for optimisation articles. If you can avoid spread value, as well.

would you happen to have a link to some articles?

[Fanotherpg]

Yeah' But is using search so difficult?

http://www.clickteam.info/kb/start/i...?showtopic=313
http://www.clickteam.info/kb/start/i...p?showtopic=94
http://www.clickteam.info/kb/start/i...p?showtopic=43
http://www.clickteam.info/kb/start/i...p?showtopic=50
http://www.create-games.com/article.asp?id=1399
http://community.clickteam.com/showthread.php?t=51478

In general look for articles by Pixelthief, Tigerworks, MuddyMole (here on the forums) or Sketchy (on TDC).

[Stephen]

You could try using For Each instead of loops.

[Corlen]

As a general rule of thumb, you want to avoid fastloops and ForEach loops as much as possible because they are quite intensive. I think ForEach loops are slightly less intensive though. It's OK to have something like 8 loops, but once you start getting into something like 50+ it really impacts your game's performance. Perhaps if you MUST use a loop on your enemies, maybe reduce the total number of enemies that can appear on screen at any given time.

Also, are you sure about whether you're telling the fastloop to happen for all enemies in the level or just the ones on screen?

[brawltaunts22]

i was trying to store values in arrays to be read out of since i needed to store more than just 26 values and i was able to share values between objects by comparing their fixed values on the y array of the table. the problem is, it doesn't seem possible to compare multiple values in the array table between specific objects on it, just the last one created, so i had to loop through them on the array table to compare the values. the framerate dropped significantly because i had to do this but it got what i needed working at least. also from my experience, this is running better than the last setup i did with the foreach object which only allowed me to loop through 20 objects before it slowed down heavily.

[Fanotherpg]

For Each is less intensive than fastloop because it's Fastloop with built-in spread value - for the simplest and not most correct explanation. Instead of doing several calculations like Object -> Spread Loop-> Index Loop Index -> Spread Actions. It just does Loop -> Particular Object -> Actions. Which helps with higher amount of objects.

And Corlen MMF is OK to handle 30k loops without a hassle on PC runtime, but the problem is what actions and conditions you are using and in what order. What extensions and so on. I got my whole project based on Fast Loops, Pixelthief same. Keeping decent FrameRate is hard but is possible.

[Corlen]

That's what I meant, sorry if I wasn't clear in what I wrote.