Someone slap me...I'm addicted to loading time improvement...
StormyStudio
United KingdomMember Posts: 3,989
As the title says someone please slap me...
I seem to have spent the past weeks spare time not creating more game content or getting any nearer to completing my long slow game production. Instead I've become addicted to get loading times down from 9.6 to 4 seconds for one of the scenes.
I've been using my own 'Load Timer Timer' built into my game .
and been tracking the differences in load times as I remove different actors, rules or images to see how it affects the loading time. Testing in GS viewer after each change and noting down the loading time... its slow, boring work but I'm addicted to knocking off a couple more seconds by tweaking rules and deleting actors.
Should I carry on or just leave it and let the users have crappy loading times...?
Latest changes:
Got rid of the majority of the change image behaviours in place of 'Change Attribute' image name...this helps...but its not knocking off lots of time.
If I delete my whole game it loads really quickly...
*Edit: If you want to join me in my new addiction and track your loading times get 'Stormys time Machine' for free on my site, www.stormystudio.com
I seem to have spent the past weeks spare time not creating more game content or getting any nearer to completing my long slow game production. Instead I've become addicted to get loading times down from 9.6 to 4 seconds for one of the scenes.
I've been using my own 'Load Timer Timer' built into my game .
and been tracking the differences in load times as I remove different actors, rules or images to see how it affects the loading time. Testing in GS viewer after each change and noting down the loading time... its slow, boring work but I'm addicted to knocking off a couple more seconds by tweaking rules and deleting actors.
Should I carry on or just leave it and let the users have crappy loading times...?
Latest changes:
Got rid of the majority of the change image behaviours in place of 'Change Attribute' image name...this helps...but its not knocking off lots of time.
If I delete my whole game it loads really quickly...
*Edit: If you want to join me in my new addiction and track your loading times get 'Stormys time Machine' for free on my site, www.stormystudio.com
Comments
However, I think you should persevere with trying to reduce load times as I think this is a huge part of player enjoyment (or rather, long load times are a major part of player irritation).
PS. Thank goodness for the red wriggly line on MacBooks, otherwise most of this reply would be unintelligible.
PPS. I wonder if when I read this through my hangover-haze tomorrow it will all make sense.
If you're not using Indexed PNG files... bah... you're not serious enough about optimization!
With BOT, I worked really hard to improve the loading times. Reducing the size of the images helped a lot. Yet, I think loading the actors themselves was also an issue. With too many actors in the scene, the scene loaded slowly... even if the actors were just invisible and empty!
Such a waste!
http://howto.nicubunu.ro/indexing_png_web/
-tenrdrmer
...and Tenrdrmer, you're clearly not worthy to be a Sous Chef.
The Title of the thread begins with "Someone slap me…."
Maybe you missed that part….
It originally said... Stop taking advantage of your position.
photics stop acting like a little girl. This isnt the imperial dynasty, its the gs forum on the internet we can act how we want. As long as hes not flat out cursing at you he can say whatever he likes. We dotn work for gamesalad, we just mod the forum. Were alloud to joke around and have our one opinions and say what we want. And you all say hes not worthy of being a sous chef but hes helped more people in a day then most people help in a year.
Twitter:rondorocket
Web: rondorocket.com
Xcode does have PNG compression... but a 75% reduction? It's not that good. (...and I think GameSalad is compressing the PNGs before Xcode gets it.)
he posted a image joking about the situation. Obviosuly no one should be calling people out, thats not what he did. The title of the thread is someone slap me, maybe you missed that part or didnt put 2 and 2 together.. every comment isn't aimed at you.
the only people insulting were you and nextgen.
And last time i checked every post you make isnt supposed to have a link to one of your products, so maybe the rules did change..
Nevertheless back on topic now.
Basically the majority of pngs in a project seem to get pngcrushed by Xcode on compile which chucks them out as 32 bit pngs, randomly it seems some images escape this Apple treatment. In iphone BOT most of your @2x 1024x1024 tiles are still 256 indexed... go figure ?
Also, I'm not sure what files Rob2 is looking at. Many of the images are not indexed. Like the non-retina display files created by GameSalad or most of the ones I used for animations.
If you're looking at the list of images, here's an example of a compressed file... x1-y1-bottom-left@2x.png ...that file is smaller in file size than the low-res version.
But Photics all that was needed to be said was that you find the images offensive and they would have been removed. Instead you but down Tenrdrmer and told him he wasn't good enough to be a mod. And I doubt the pictures were really that offensive, but if they were, please never visit 4chan.
Also Photics, why must you link to bot in every post? I thought you were against doing that (your comic) Its kind of annoying and I think after the fifth link we know what the app is. Your trying to sell your game to developers and not consumers that read your comic, not very logical.
But on topic (poor stormy, isn't getting any feedback on what he posted) I think that the shorter the load times the better for a click adventure. It depends though, are you switching the room and changing scene or is the scene change just for different puzzles and the like? If you change scenes every room, backtracking will be a chore and so will even going forward.
I would be able to optimize my games even further if GameSalad allowed manual control of which images are used for Retina Display and non-retina display.
I did lots of Ad Hoc testing to figure out this information. I've sent an email to GameSalad about this information. Performance could dramatically improve if the software had some minor changes.
...and it's not every post. The link in the post before yours is an email link. Ha ha... that was created automatically. Maybe you should re-read what I posted. Basically... indexed PNG files dramatically reduced the size of my game and it improved the loading times. I turned a 4-6 seconds loading time into 2-3 seconds. That seems like highly relevant information here.
Photics. You starting the insults. So lets try to not be hypocrites here. I tried to offer several Slap options for Stormy But On of the images said "B**** Slap" and that was too offensive.
@Stormy. I personally and not worried about the loading time workarounds. I have never had a game so bad that It really concerned me. And knowing they have shifted focus to the load time issues mean hopefully the workarounds will be a waste of time. This is of course my own personal Opinion. and in no way meant to reflect the opinions of any other moderator or GameSalad employee.
edit : cheers
My useful information was challenged. I proved that my information was correct. My findings could be used to improve current GameSalad games... and then GAMESALAD ITSELF if the developers follow my suggestions.