Too many scenes

Eagleone · October 2011

The other day I read that having too many scenes in your project is not a good thing. Not quite sure if this true, but I always thought the amount of actors and how much code is involved are the primarily factors to consider when it comes to your game's performance.

Anyone?

JohnPapiomitis · October 2011

i wouldnt worry about the ammount of scenes

Eagleone · October 2011

Ok, thanks for your input.

MarkOnTheIron · October 2011

The game I'm developing has about 230 scenes.

Performance is excellent in terms of fps and loading times so you don't have to worry about that.

The only thing you should really worry is the performance of the Creator, with so many scenes it will lag a lot. With my heavily fragmented almost full iMac it takes about 6/7 minutes to just open the project, so you should consider having a clean dedicated machine to work with it (with my clean MacBook Pro it takes about 1 minute to open the project).

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Free GS demo: High score and ; ; ; ;

Eagleone · October 2011

MarkOnTheIron, so glad you brought that up because I've also come across the lag issue, sometimes it lags, sometimes it doesn't and I always wondered if its my computer or if the game is actually gonna turn out laggy.

I guess I don't have to worry about that anymore, thanks for your input.

230 scenes, just out of curiosity, if you don't mind me asking how many actors do you have since you have a hell of a lot of scenes?

Thanks again.

MarkOnTheIron · October 2011

I have a total of about 25 actors, but in each scene there aren't more than 7 different actors. I use lots of instances of the same actor and to avoid to unlock them (in case that I have to edit them) I code them so that I can unlock only self attributes.

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Free GS demo: High score and ; ; ; ;

Eagleone · October 2011

Sounds good, would love to see your game one day.

Speaking of unlocking those actors, why is it better to keep those actors locked? I often wonder that.

MarkOnTheIron · October 2011

Eagleone said:
Speaking of unlocking those actors, why is it better to keep those actors locked? I often wonder that.

I have two main reasons for doing that:

1. Speed up developing time. Take the situation where you have 100 scenes and in each one you have the same actor that you have unlocked to modify a value. Then while testing you find a bug in that actor and to correct it you need to open every unlocked instance of the actor to modify a rule, and that could be really frustrating. Obviously there are some situations where your only option is to unlock the whole actor but that should always be your last resource.

2. Keep project size down. In GS almost all the game is kept in .xml files. Usually in a scene file there are only the X and Y positions of the actors. If you unlock the actor every single rule of that actor will be duplicated from the actor file to the scene one, and in case your actor is full with rules it may result in a scene size 10 times the original one. Multiply that for 100 scenes and those few KB become a lot more. I've worked on projects that after some optimizations of the unlocked actors lost nearly 1 MB.

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Free GS demo: High score and ; ; ; ;

Eagleone · October 2011

I see, now it makes a lot more sense. I didn't know that unlocking those actors had such an effect. Thank you very much for your time, certainly learned something today.

Good luck with your project.

Too many scenes

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