Game speed in high-res

[Dave Gilbert]

Hi all,

I know that AGS is very sluggish when it comes to hi-res.Ã,  I know folks complained that "Barn Runner", which was in hi-res, became almost impossible to play on some computers merely because the snow/rain plug-in was enabled.Ã,  The author upped the speed and everything was fine on its second release, but it got me thinking.Ã,  I decided to pool the community and see if we could gather some tips on optimizing speed in hi-res.Ã,  Would using palletes for sprites make any difference?Ã,  I know it decreases the file size, but does that affect the speed?  Thanks!

-Dave

[Pumaman]

Barn Runner's apparent slowness to play was just down to the player character having his movement speed set too slow. I tried it out and got 140 fps in hi-res on my 1.5 GHz system (and thus it should manage a perfectly playable 40 fps on 500 MHz systems), so I don't think there's any particular slowness issue with things.

In terms of ensuring your game runs as fast as possible, ensuring that all your sprites and backgrounds are imported at the same colour depth as the game is the most important thing. If your game runs at 16-bit colour but you imported some 256-colour backgrounds, a load of colour conversion will have to take place in-game to sort it out.

Importing sprites is easy because they are automatically converted to your game colour depth, however.

If there are particular rooms in particular games which do run slowly, then I can always investigate the circumstances and see if there's any room for optimisation.

[Radiant]

How about sprites imported to the wrong resolution? Would that cause a slowdown?

[Pumaman]

If the sprite is imported at one resolution, and then you change the game resolution to something else, that could cause a slowdown, yes. It shouldn't be noticable unless the sprite is large, however.