I have been adding rooms and working with areas (walkable area, walk behinds, etc.) and testing the game as I went from room to room. It always seemed to work fine, but after working with one room, the test game ran very very slowly. Trying starting from other rooms, it also ran slowly there. Is there something I could have done in that one room to cause that? Or is it possible that I have made the game too big for the program to handle? I have a lot of rooms- about 30, and I have been using photographs (24bit Bmps I believe) for each of them. (And no, I did not change the character speed downwards).
how much RAM etc. have you got? Its more likey a problem with your PC than that you have made the game too big for AGS to handle, since it can handle ALOT (see System Limits in the manual)
Try checking the option "Resource split every Mb:" in general settings and set some number for size (like trying with 3MB, 2MB, 1MB) and see if loading speed can be improved.
Older versions of AGS were know to have long delays loading resources if the game's too big, that's why the above option was added, hoping to improve loading times by chopping the game resources into smaller chrunks.
Of course, it can also be related to the specs of the computer.
Yep, could very well be the specs of your computer. Try adjusting some of the games settings (example, having the anti-aliasing sprites option enabled may slow things down on a older/slower system, so perhaps disable that option).
And another thought, did you add anything to the "repeatedly_execute" part of the main global script that may be causing the slowdown?
My first guess was, what is already said, that the continous testing got too heavy on your system. My computer starts slowing down after it has been on for a long time and processed a lot fo data. Did you try restarting? If you did, and the problem was still there, you should try the splitting option. Also, did you add any large objects or character to the rooms?
Did anyone consider it might just be the resolution of the game, or the color depth?
800x600, or 640x400 might be too high for alot of older computers. I'm not sure if you're using those, but if you are, lower it down to 320x200 maybe.
And check your color depth and change it lower if necessary down to 16 bit or 256 colors.
Hope this helps.
... yes, infact thats what we all said so far.
'post your computer specs.' or 'It could be down to the specs of your computer'
Ok, I don't thin it should be due to hardware, I just got a new computer. It has 512 MB of ram and a 2800 AMD Athalon Processor. From what I understand about hardware (which is admittedly not much) that should be far beyond what is needed to run this sort of program. Also, in reference to the other comment, yes i tried restaring, and it had no effect. :-\
Did you try splitting teh resource?
I would make a copy of the game, then delete the last thing I did in the room in question and see if it gets better.If no delete the next thing (or the whole room). This way you should be able to isolate the bad code in no time.
When the slowdown occurs, are other programs affected as well?
try running it from the compiled folder
Ok, so. I tried the resource split. It seemed to help a tiny bit, but its still mind numbingly slow, and it might have been my imagination although it did load up noticably faster. To answer some of the other questions (in order of what I remember people asking) 1. its the same when run from the compiled file. 2. I tried erasing the whole room I had been working on, and it was still the same. I tried re-making the whole room again, and it was the same. (As far as I can tell no other programs were effected). 3. I don't think it can have anything to do with scripts, as I have yet to actually do any scripting at all. I really do appreciate all these suggestions though, sorry if this gets tiresome. :)
It's probably due to the loading time of the resource files then, you may experience more with the split size setting to see if it can further improve.
There is one more setting we didn't try, as far I as I know ;)
If you go to "Advanced Settings" in the game setup, you can adjust the amount of memory used by AGS. At least in my version it defaults to 10MB, so if for some reason, your system is loading slow maybe you could set this to match the total of your loaded files. This should improve perfprmance, I suppose...