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Re: [pygame] Frantic (again)



I don't see any reason why the memory requirements should be so large.
I have 512 mb of ram and I have an extra pagefile on a separate hard-drive...
After your program was run, Windows says it's allocated 1491 MB total to PF.
Can you shed some light on what's filling up ~2 gigs of ram+virtual memory?
Not trying to be mean, I would just like to know.
It seems like even if you pre-loaded all your animations and sounds and music
it wouldn't use up more than ~150 mb.
The only thing I could see taking up that much memory were if you calculated the rotations
of all of your sprites through 360 degrees and stored them in a huge array.
Are you doing that?
This would also make sense for the long load time at startup.
It would be better memory-usage wise to just rotate the sprites at runtime.
It might be a little slower, but I'm not willing to wait for 8 minutes for a game to load, and
I am willing to play a game that's running at 25 fps vs 30.
Just make sure you rotate from source image and not from a previously-rotated image.
Anyway,
The game looked nice. Sprites were good looking, explosions too.
The issues I had with gameplay were
1. The enemies wrap around the screen(i assume) but the bullets don't.
I love that about the asteroids, being able to shoot the enemies from through the screen. Perhaps you don't want this,
but I liked it in asteroids.
2. The bullets die out after about 3/5 of the screen. I have to fly over to the enemies to kill them.
3.The maximum acceleration was a little too slow. Turning was too slow.
The deceleration was too high. It was too easy to position yourself somewhere or avoid the enemies.


I only played the first level, however, so I don't know if these persist throughout the game or not.
Perhaps different weapons can shoot further, etc.
It was pretty fun, interesting premise (the backstory.) I'll try it again when the memory issues are dealt with
and I'll play it more thoroughly & give more gameplay-oriented feedback.
No chance you'll release the source since you're thinking of going Shareware I guess?
-Luke




Rene Dudfield wrote:
ah, it's not just my machine.

I think the loading speed, and slowness for animations will dissapear
by loading stuff incrementally.  Then freeing it at the end of each
level if not used.

Cheers



On 20 Jun 2006 04:28:39 -0700, Aaron Maupin <maupin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
David Mikesell wrote:

>> I think it might have been because I had a machine with only 512MB of
>> ram. amd athlon 2100+, geforce ti4200 64MB vid ram. After I finished
>> the game windows told me it was increasing the amount of virtual
>> memory I used.
>
> Frankly, I'm surprised it ran at all on that machine.


Yikes. Well, it ran on my 1.2 GHZ laptop with 512 MB and only Intel
onboard video. However it definitely takes too long to load, and after
playing it I can't understand why... or where all the memory is being
used. Gameplay was fine (I like the magma gun) and was quite smooth,
but only after I had seen a new explosion animation. The first time an
animation played, the fps dropped to single digits for about 5 or 6 seconds.


And after quitting, I too received a message that Windows had increased
virtual memory.  First time I've ever seen that.  ;)

One neat thing is that the music loop stuttered while it sat loading,
and sounded pretty cool for 2 or 3 minutes.  But then it started
stuttering too much and the cool effect quickly disappeared.

I enjoyed playing it, but think it's too heavy on memory requirements
for what it is.  And possibly people who enjoy Asteroids type games will
have crappy PCs like mine...  My advice, for whatever it's worth, is to
make a lighter, leaner version.

Aaron