I know with a recently fixed bug that summoning and unsummoning and resummoning all units once was enough to crash the game. That bug is thankfully fixed but something came out of it- new characters are a massive load on the engine. I am still getting a lot of slowdown in some missions. I’d like an option to make it so that all characters were all drawn off the same model rather than each variation of a character having their own model. All characters could be red say. This minor feature should make the game playable for a lot of people and fix a lot of issues. Some people like each character being individual, some don’t care.
Turn off character graphics
Personally i also experienced a general drop in performance.
When i summon around 12 or more Defenders and have speed on 2x or 4x, the game slows down massively and the control becomes sluggish. Have to click like 10 times to actually select one of the defender (or rather i slow down to 1/2 speed to be able to do that). That never happened before… so you might have solved the Memory Leak, but for whatever reason the performance massively droppen overall…
If turning of the differen character graphics would solve that I would also appreciate such a function.
mfg
Yinan
Sounds like we have a new memory leak. Can both of you confirm which version of the game you’re playing (it’ll say in the lower-right corner of the title screen). Thanks!
happened in both 1.0.0 and 1.0.1 for me.
The thing is, that if you run it on lower speed (1x or 1/2x) everything is fine. And starting a new game (or rather a new battle/stage) everything is fine again… so either it’s a memory leak where the memory is deallocated once the battle is over or its really a performance thing…
What it most likely is, is a memory leak in battle. Recoloring character graphics is a very sensitive thing as flash/flixel doesn’t give me an easy way to reuse the same pixel data without stashing a freshly recolored copy in memory, and there’s a definite memory overhead there. It could really use some opitimization and I need to go over it with a fine-toothed comb to make sure it’s working correctly. I specifically clear the graphics cache and a lot of other memory stuff after every battle, so the fact that the problem goes away after battle makes me pretty sure that’s what it is.
Also, possibly related:
On 4x speed, in order to maintain reasonable determinism, the timestep is the same as in 2x speed, but runs two updates per cycle. So although 1/4x, 1/2x, 1x, and 2x all just adjust the timestep (and thus don’t do any more processing than normal, they just move things at different speeds), 4x is twice as performance intensive as 2x. I think it’s naturally more performance intensive to move things at higher speeds because more things happen faster (more collisions, more resolutions, etc etc), so 2x will take more processing than 1x, etc, etc, but 4x is a discrete jump in calculations on top of that natural effect.