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Next item, TGB running REALLY sluggish

by Neil Petrick · in Torque Game Builder · 09/20/2006 (4:03 pm) · 5 replies

I don't know what I did. I switched from the first tutorial to the second one, a fish game and now all of a sudden my TGB is running extrememly sluggishly. Cursor is dragging and when I run the project it is laggy and skips. Only thing I did was test what it looked like in full screen mode. Then I loaded the imagemaps like it told me to and that's when I noticed it was realy slow. Anyone else had this problem? I tried a quick restart of the computer and it didn't noticeable help.
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Neil Petrick
#1
09/20/2006 (9:27 pm)
Ok, so I confirmed it is something to do with the second fish tutorial. I reloaded my earlier project and it runs fine with no slow-down. My computer is a 1.7ghz with 640(512+128) of ram and a nvidia gforce mx440 64meg video card. Is there an imagemap that I loaded incorrectly? I'm going to delete the project and rebuild it from scratch using the instructions so I can pinpoint the exact moment of slowdown...

Ok. I've just gone back and tried adding and taking out imagemaps and so far I have come up with this. If I import all three background images(background.jpg, rocksfar, rocksnear) and it slows down, even more if I actually drop them onto the level window. If I delete(by dragging the imagemap onto the garbage can icon) then it all of a sudden stops being laggy and clears up. It doesn't seem to matter which imagemap either. I also tried reloading the imagemaps as per the tutorial and I'm right back where I started.
I meet the system requirements... something I don't know about?

Associate Tom Spilman
Sickhead Games
#2
09/20/2006 (9:46 pm)
On a 64MB card i would say that sounds like memory fragmentation. What size are those backgrounds?

Torque 3D Owner Stephen Zepp
#3
09/21/2006 (12:39 am)
I agree with Tom, this does sound like you are thrashing your video memory. 64M just is not a lot of room to store high quality, large size images.

Neil Petrick
#4
09/21/2006 (7:51 am)
That is what I thought and it does seem like they are loaded at full size, which is 1600x1200. yet, in the first fish tutorial all of those images are allready loaded. Is there a way to load them at a smaller size? or do I just need to edit them with some tool(I use gimp) to make their size more managable? I plan on upgrading I just wanted to make sure it wasn't soemthing else like my processor. (cause I plan on having more than three images in my project....)

Torque 3D Owner Stephen Zepp
#5
09/21/2006 (10:35 pm)
There are quite a few tips and tricks for optimization of texture usage in your /documentation directory--it has it's own .pdf!