I wanted to ask one thing and I'll do it here because this doesn't sound like beginners question.
My game is 320x240 16-bit color.
I made a system in AGS for using sniper rifle scope.
Room is covered with *huge* black character (dims: 640x300), basically large black rectangle with drawn circle and sniping lines at the center (with transparent colour).
and Excecute_Repeatedly event will change characters x and y relatively to mouse.x and mouse.y--
okay, this worked.
Now, what I want to ask, does way like that slow game down too much? Just I'm running AGS way below minimum requirements (Pentium 75MHz, 32 MB RAM, Directx 9.0, 1MB video) and didn't notice any slowdown --- but replacing that big sprite around every step doesn't make much sense to me neither. Is AGS really able to work efficently with so large sprites, or was it just because I didn't have any other characters in that room, neither any music/sound?
I'm asking that because AGS was previously (older versions, i remember) slowed by using large objects and for my CPU, any higher resolution will be painful, so I can't test that much, but If that works, I'm gonna increase resolution and thus- that means even bigger "sniperscope sprite".
Or is there any limit for a sprite dimensions which would work fine to some point?
edit: Uh, noticed a thread about same thing here -- I think we'll have a general question
I'm surprised you're not getting a slowdown, to be quite honest :)
Try enabling the FPS display (put Debug(4,1); in game_start), then try running the game at 640x480 (in Setup) and see how much difference it makes.
Thanks, CJ.
By raising resolution, FPS fell from 8 to 2-3.
Then again, with 320x240 8-bit, same thing is 14 fps.
Seems that I should start learning to draw with less colors :)
I noticed that AGS will take RAM as primary performance factor - with 16 MB, slowdown is critical... (scope "jumps" as mouse moves, but still, playable!) I think that AGS-s minimum requirements start at p75 with 8MB ram. Below that, It's slow.
After ags moved into Windows only- fadein-out is MUCH faster. Old DOS versions had painful fading.
Hey, and if someone wants a sniper rifle example, I'll be happy to put it up somewhere, let me know.
Ouch, 8 fps?
The AGS minimum requirements are what you need to run at 40 fps (which is the speed it's supposed to run at). :)
Yeah.. But I *actually* CAN play games. What else do I need?
have you tried using an overlay instead of a character for the sniper scope?
maybe i don't know any better but overlays always seemed to draw fast and nice for me
Ov.. what?
I've noticed that rooms with lot of scripting are *much* slower, like in Pleurghburg, though it has low resolution.
look up overlays in the ags help and see if it runs faster for you