My Sidescroller

Okay, didn't wanna fill up the Screenshot thread, so here goes:

<img src="http://thomasmahler.com/images/corrupted_01small.jpg">

I've been testing the older build for a bit on a couple of machines now. The moBlur version is doggone slow on my AMD CPU, ATI GPU Tablet PC. If I start the non-moBlur version, it's sorta playable, but it's at around 20fps.

It works pretty great on every non-laptop machine I tried though - even on really old Pentium Ds with old Geforce 6 GPUs, so I'm not sure if it's just the way I build it that eats so much performance on some systems or if there are some effects that just slow down the performance on some machines like hell.

If you guys could try it out on your machine and tell me what specs your machine has and how it runs, it'd really help figuring out how to improve the performance.

Here's the moBlur version:

http://www.thomasmahler.com/files/corrupted_01old.exe

Non-moBlur:

http://www.thomasmahler.com/files/corrupted_01.exe

I'll target a higher-end, 720p version, but I definitely want it to be playable on 3-4 year old boxes.

System: Intel Conroe Dual Core 2.13ghz, 4gb RAM, ATI x1900xt (512mb).

Motion blur version stutters, not smooth at all. Non motion blur version is ultra smooth. I'd stick to having no motion blur.

I'll try and test it later on my old P4 2.4ghz with an old ATI s9000 Pro GPU.

So maybe it really only has to do with ATI cards? Cause your x1900 should be faster than a GeForce 6 I guess. And your Core Duo is definitely faster than the Pentium D.

The motion blur version didn't run very well, but the non-motion blur one ran great. My system has an Athlon 64 2.4GHz CPU, 1.25GB of RAM, and a GeForce 8600gt with 512MB of VRAM.

motion blur runs fine for me. 8800GT

I don't know how your game works, but if that's one big backdrop it's going to be alot slower than splitting it up, as well as being more VRAM intensive (a big problem if you have larger levels).

Motion blur version seemed fairly slow and had that weird 'stuttering' going on with the movement, the non-motion blur version seemed to be fine.

I'm running it on a 3Ghz pentium 4, 1.5gb of ram with a GeForce 7600GT 512mb

Motion blur version runs like poo, non motion blur runs sweet... this is on my bigger laptop.

Intel Centrino Duo (2.0Ghz)

4Gb DDR2 800

512Mb GeForce 8400M (256Mb Turbocache)

And as expected, it all runs sweet on my main computer

Intel Q9300 (2.5Ghz)

4Gb OCZ Reaper DDR2 1066

2 x GeForce GTX280 1Gb (in SLI)

~Sol

Thanks guys, so I'll just turn off MoBlur. Damn shame though, I love the effect.

If it's just for the main character and there's not too many animations, couldn't you just pre-render the effect in Photoshop (or similar) if you like it that much? I guess it all depends on the number of characters/enemies/whatever and how many frames of animation they have. When you have to do something manually and it's a lot of work, you tend not to love it as much

On a side note, I love the style of this. I could imagine a type of "Another World" game but more surreal and dark. The motion blur was nice and if you can get away with pre-rendering it then it'll add to the style. You could could probably get away with a subtle trail of the sprite as it moves (like mouse trails but not as extreme). When the character is stood still, the trails could shake gently around the character, very subtle.. like within 2 pixels of the boundaries of the character. That's just some ideas I get when I look at it..

It jerks around probably too much to play on my old PC (even without motion blur). PC is an AMD Athlon 3200+, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200, 1 gig RAM.

Maybe you should make a fullscreen demo, though - that often makes a lot of difference. Windows treats fullscreen apps so much better.

Both versions work as smoothly here.

3gb of RAM.

8800GT 512mb

AMD X2 5200+

I'm really surprised people are getting slowdown....if you dont mind me asking how is your scene being rendered ? Are there any pixel shaders? It looks beautiful btw!

No Pixel Shaders. Every scene element is just a png image at its source, so it's the image with an alpha channel - all of that put together in the scene. And some of the elements are quite large (the format of the project is 720p), which is probably why things slow down.

The idea is simply that I can basically concept and design everything in Photoshop and then quickly put all the layers into seperate png files and layout them again in Construct.

I haven't yet created tiled grass and so on for the ground, so the grass patches are 3-4 grass 'chunks'.

The motion blur version is the same thing but moBlur added in the global project properties. Nothing else, nothing fancy - but I really like the moBlur effect with that design, it gives it a sorta dreamy look.

Have you guys tried both layouts? You can use the tab key to switch between layouts, the second one has scrolling in it - a good way to test if the scene slows down.

Oh, btw, is there a way to check how much fps we get for the runtime? That'd be helpful for debugging and making sure that the thing runs even on older hardware.

Oh, btw, is there a way to check how much fps we get for the runtime? That'd be helpful for debugging and making sure that the thing runs even on older hardware.

Enable 'FPS in caption' in Application Properties. However, exported EXEs won't put the FPS in the caption, only the preview. You'll need to show FPS in-game for other people to know their FPS, or use a program like FRAPS to tell you.