Lag within the menu in battle

#1

Don’t know if this is a bug per say, but during battles on the menu where you select characters, spells, etc… it always seems to lag when the pointer is used on this menu.
By lag I mean the pointer slows and skips around the screen when I move it, instead of flowing smoothly like it does when just clicking on units placed on the map and such.

I eventually just made myself use the keys because I could not get used to the skipping issues. Just wondering if this will be fixed or is it just something that can’t be fixed?

#2

Just to clarify - is it only over certain areas of the screen? Such as, when mouse-overing various characters or buttons, etc?

That was the very first thing I ever coded, so it’s entirely possible there’s some less than efficient stuff in there. It’s probably something that can be fixed if I hack at it enough and remember what’s going on in the guts of it.

#3

It acts differently for me at specific points, but during any battle at any point whenever I go to select a character on the menu to place on the field it skips around, specifically when hovering over a character portrait. I think when highlighting characters it is taking time to retrieve the data and display it that it’s effecting the mouse.

So basically the only consistent lag is highlighting a new character on the character and spell select menu on the side of the screen during battles.

#4

I’ve definitely noticed the same issue. It seems that the more new units I lay down while paused, the worse the lag gets. I’ll usually lay down 5 or 6, unpause for a second to let the glowy “just placed” animation fade, then pause and place more. There have also been times when the game bogs to a standstill while in pause mode and using the overlay, but again unpausing fixes this.

-zenchronus

#5

I’m not sure how reliant the game is on Flash, but with bigger and heavier games the lag issues can’t be fixed at all because of flash not being able to handle heavy loads. Though I don’t know if it’s flash uncooperative, or just cluttered code or something along those lines.

#6

The game uses the flixel engine, so it can definitely handle more than your regular flash engine, it just might need some optimization. In the future we’ll be moving to HaXe, which should get us even faster performance as we can compile that to C++ for the download versions, and still create a flash browser demo.

#7

Flixel I see now, I have made a couple small things with Flixel, and eventually getting this to C++ would be better, especially since people wouldn’t be able to just copy your own code through Sothink. Guessing now since you’re using Flixel it is just something in the code.

#8

I was not able to use the cursor in-game. It lagged a lot whenever I enabled it. I’m on an HP “gaming” laptop (which means it can run high quality graphics games with the settings cranked to ultra-low :stuck_out_tongue: ).

It ran fine when I clicked to use the hardware cursor instead.

#9

The flixel cursor is kinda infamous for being laggy. I also disabled it and noticed a decrease in laggyness.

#10

@Hueyk I’m on an HP laptop that can actually run quality games on higher settings, and never had a problem with the mouse. Possibly in could have something to do with the mouse settings in the computer itself that won’t let your mouse be changed.

#11

I fixed the input lag when mousing over characters. The lag was at about 250 ms before the fix, and I got it down to ~50 ms. Not perfect, but definitely an improvement. You can still notice that the lag is there, but it should be waaaaaay better than it was before, and you can now smoothly “swipe” across all the character buttons.

The fix will be in version 0.8.9

#12

Thank you, this wasn’t a big issue but was annoying at times. Hope that 0.8.9 is released soon. Keep up the good work :slight_smile:

#13

The new schedule is to put new patches out on Mondays, so I have time over the week to deal with any issues that come up and help people who have trouble getting the update.

So this patch should be out on Monday!