Questions about large areas

[highkingtorygg]

I don't know where else to put this, so I am assuming it goes here.

What is the maximum size of the background? And will it slow the game down if it is a huge background?
Now say I wanted to populate the background. Will large amounts of characters or objects slow it down?
does it zoom to the resolution you've set for the game?

Spoiler

I guess these are mostly stupid questions, but help is appreciated nonetheless

[close]

[Slasher]

What is the maximum size of the background? And will it slow the game down if it is a huge background?

Backgrounds imported that are larger than the set game res will make it become scroll-able. If a background is much much larger then yes, it could slow the game a little. I don't know if there is a max background size. Of course you have to take into account your CPU.

Will large amounts of characters or objects slow it down?

On top of this if you add many characters/objects it won't slow down much more unless you have a lot of animations going on at the same time: like a crowded pub for instance where everyone is talking or doing things at the same time.

I think getting the right 'balance' is the key.

[Khris]

Backgrounds do not zoom; if a background is larger than the game's resolution, it will scroll.
Very big backgrounds can cause problems; Dustbowl used one huge room for the entire game map, and after people reported crashes, the map was split into several parts. OTOH, its map was like 100(?) screens big. So it depends on the magnitude.

[Monsieur OUXX]

What I have noticed though is that large backgrounds take a LOT of ram in memory. I have this 5000x5000px PNG background (105kB on disk) and it takes more than 200MB of RAM! And since I need a copy of it, my game takes over 400MB of RAM. :-(

[Jack]

In my experience using the max amount of objects in the game for a room will not cause any slowdown, but large objects will (on older hardware).

I used one parallaxing room which was 2400x600, with six more objects on top of that which were each nearly equally large.

Of the two people I know that played it on older hardware, one experienced slowdown in this room and the other didn't.

[Crimson Wizard]

Also: in very large rooms built-in AGS pathfinding works really slow. This means that when you order character to walk, game may freeze for a second.

[Slasher]

Crimson Wizard

in very large rooms built-in AGS pathfinding works really slow.

yeah, i find it best to split walk (block) into more than one command if walking a long way.