Game speed enhancement?

[JoelCBarker]

My resolution problem showed me that 320 is lightning quick, might be  a lousy question, but is there any way to soup-up my game in 640 480?
-Joel

I think its worth mentioning that my views things that act as graphics speed impediments all have a good amount of color detail in them or that the frames are weighty files. Is there a way to speed things up aside from lowering my picture quality, I suppose is what I'm after.

[TerranRich]

Yes. Buy a faster computer.

Seriously though, can you think of anything off-hand that would speed things up besides deleting sprites and views and cutting corners? If not, then neither can we. There really isn't any secret to "souping up" a game's speed short of deleting things. Even that might not work.

[JoelCBarker]

Damn, then I guess if I try and fake it by increasing all my speeds I'll either just be slowing it more or making it really fast on someone elses' awesome computer. Would you do that?
-Joel

[Ginny]

Well, since speed has a connection to the filesize, there might be something.
I read this in a tutorial which I can't find now, credits to whoever it was that wrote it:
For hi-res games, select all but the first 42 pallete slots and set them to "This slot is background specific" and then convert the game to hi-color. Then with all backgrounds set them to Indexed color and reduce their colors to 217 or less if you don't need that many, but 217 will do fine. This shouldn't lower the quality at all, but will decrease file size.
Make sure when decreasing colors you use 100% dithering, to ensure the quality stays the same.

Hope this helps .

I didn't quite understand, but if you're having some problems with colors, this might help, I had some problems with coloring of my background, and this helped fix it for some reason.

[JoelCBarker]

mm... after I read your entry I tried to do that on a test game. all but the first 42 are by default 'this color is room specific'. Is that the same as background specific? Because if it isn't I can't find any way to change it to that. Because that is the default, I imagine when I converted my real game it had the effect you're describing. It isn't incredibly slow but of course, it could be faster! At least, it wasn't as slow as apprentice.   :o
-Joel

[Ginny]

Hmm, odd, I don't remember apprentice being very slow. But then again I'm running at Pentium 4 1.5 giga-hertz so..

Anyway, yes, it's by default room/background specific. The reason I indicated to make it 42 not room specific was because in the tutorial it actually said to just make all colors but the first 17 (which are locked) into room specific, but in my case this screwed with the sprites so i returned it to 42. Dunno if it did anything to size, but it helped with color problems. Basically, all you really need to do is make your backgrounds 217 colors, than hopefully it will help a little.

[JoelCBarker]

Thanks and all that, Apprentice wasn't slow for you? now hate my computer
-joel