UPDATE: Looks like the serious lag issues occur when you hovered over the character...click and hold the guy, wait for it to slow down and then move off the screen with the button still held down. I'm getting closer to solving this...
So after about two weeks of basically restarting this whole process, and optimizing and making my code more efficient, I came to realize that this was probably a dumb idea.
What I should have done in reality is worked on adding to the game, but I became increasingly annoyed when I had about 30 enemies and yo ucould noticeable tell there was a significant lag. And the worst is, its still not complete, I'm having trouble with Mouse Listeners, specifically when you control and hold a main character.
Here's a look at the game so far, and you can see that it lags significantly when you just click and hold a red guy, but then when you release, the game smooths out again:
So you can see that it works great, and its because of a few things I smoothed out in my code:
- I removed almost ALL timers. I had timers for any particular event, for walking, waiting, throwing, loading, getting hit (actually this one still remains), the animation for when a snowball hits the floor, you name it, it was most likely timed. But I did remove them and stop them appropriately, but I have a feeling the "new" keyword was really killing my efficiency...which leads me to....
- Creating too many new objects almost every frame. I don't know why I ignored this, but I had new snowballs being created for every throw, this was a big no-no; I even had a new object being created everytime for when you hovered. Not to mention the footprints about every 20 pixels. So a new footprint X 54 guys X 54 new timers being created (since I faded them out after about 3 seconds, then destroyed them) really puts a damper on your game smoothness.
- Too many checks of unnecessary collisions. I definitely had some objects being checked twice, ie: I had a giant array for all snowballs, and I had to do a check each time so that a green snowball wouldn't react to another green snowball. Brutal. I ended up separating the arrays and really doing a check with green snowballs vs. 3 red guys.
- Overuse of Math functions. I'm talking about the Math (dot) notation. I used it almost every throw for Math.sin, Math.PI, the worst was that every guy had their own independant listener, and that EACH frame would do a Math.abs to determine if they reached a target point. Check this site to optimize some basic math notation! Also I replaced Math.PI with a global variable set to 3.14159.
- Vectors instead of Arrays. I haven't actually implemented this yet, since I'm a little lazy, but I will try it out. I hear this really helps out. And avoid using array.push and DON'T USE SPLICE OR DELETE!!! Try to reuse these objects, but if not, I would suggest setting removing them from the DisplayList (via removeChild(object:MovieClip)) and nulling the array index. Then always avoid checking null indices.
- Reuse objects you already have on the screen. I now only create brand new snowballs if all current snowballs are either in the air, or none have been created yet. So basically as soon as a snowball hits the ground, I set that alpha to 0 and save it for later.
- Use Sprites. I haven't done this either, but creating Sprite sets (or Tile Sheets) and using pure Sprites (which are one-frame movieclips with basically all the event functions) really can help for efficiency.
I have to still update the other levels, currently I'm really stuck on Mouse Listeners. It just seems that when you click down on a character, and hes ready to throw, the gameplay eventually gets really, r e a l l y, r e a l l y, SLLLLLOoOoOOOW. But then let go and see the gameplay resume to normal.
Posted via web from VG Games
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