Should Gamesalad be able to handle this?

JScott

Hi gang, working on a pretty ambitious game, just wondering if I might be asking too much of GS with this. The programming's going pretty well, but game gets pretty laggy with a lot of actors battling at once.

Please have a look at the vid. In the intense battle the frame rate drops to 30 and stays between 30-40 mostly. Lag is most noticeable when scrolling the scene, don't if that is normal and/or can be improved. This many actors at once in the game will be pretty rare, but could happen. I just threw this together to test. Most of my game trials run around 60fps-until a big battle.

My question is basically, in the hands of a better programmer, could this scene be smooth, or is it just too much going on for GS? I could be guilty of sloppy coding (a lot of trial and error to get this far), in fact hopefully that's the case, as that's fixable.

I've turned off the sounds (no difference) and took out the text displays on actors (no difference). Only the bowmen are animated at this point, so if animation is the problem it is going to get a lot worse...Behind the scenes there are a lot of magnitudes going on, but not constant.

Any ideas? It'd be really disappointing to abandon this project, or even to have to dumb it down.

Thanks!