I've been wondering this for a while - I know there's an object limit for rooms, where after a certain point it slows your game hideously. I've found having even one object slows me down awfully.
But to get around this I've just been using Characters as Objects...with a 600 character limit, and only about 50 actual people-characters in my game, I don't think I'll run out. For stationary, non-or-barely-animated things I can always just draw the object in with the background and use a hotspot over it. And having a bunch of Characters in one room doesn't seem to slow it down at all. I do the same thing for background walk-behinds...I just put a Character in the room that looks like that part of the background, and set my baselines accordingly, to save trouble.
So is there some reason why people don't do this more often? Or does everybody do it and just not talk about it? :)
It's just not normal that one object slows your game down! This shouldn't be the case. Anyways, I think everybody has his or her own preferences when it comes to what one uses to represent a certain object or whatever. Use what fits best and gives you the most control in the easiest way possible and you're fine.
Characters are portable from room-to-room, so if your character can put inv items down again then they are useful (however, most point-and-clicks dont allow this, unlike IF games).
dkh: Yeah, I was surprised about the one-object thing too. It might be since my game is the 32-bit variety, and my processor is still a 500 MHZ Pentium III. I find a lot of the newer games won't run on it properly. I was just curious if most people had realized they could do the thing with characters, to save themselves getting bogged down by objects, or if there was some good reason why not to. Guess it's just all down to preference, like you said.
From the manual (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/manual/System%20Requirements.htm):
Quote
(System requirements)
# 320x200, 32-bit colour: 300 Mhz or above
# 640x400, 32-bit colour: 700 Mhz system minimum, may need faster if you use large objects
# 800x600, 32-bit colour: 900 Mhz system minimum, may need faster if you use large objects
So it probably is the 32-bit graphics, with your processor.
Also, I think the limit is 300 characters, not 600 as you said (which is still plenty, obviously).
Whoops, you're right, I was thinking of a different one. It's 300. I've also noticed that when my screen auto-stretches my 640x480 game to the 800x600 resolution of the screen, it slows down badly. But if I run it in a window, it's much faster/smoother.