Poor C2 Editor Performance On Larger Projects

— are you using a laptop with Windows 10? Is it clean installed?

Windows 8.1 is doing good but not Windows 10.

People who commonly have this issue are using a laptop with Windows 10 in it since most Desktop users with Windows 10 aren't affected.

I'm not sure but I assume that it might have to do with manufacturer drivers or OS customized bloatware on laptop devices.

Though, this is just a matter of speculation.

How is it going on your end?

— are you using a laptop with Windows 10?

—

I have tried:

• Powerful desktop with W10 (32gb ram, 6700k)
• 2x Laptop with W10
• VM with W10

All the above hit this issue. There is no correlation in hardware and software that I can see. One of the laptops was a fresh install of W10.

I have also tried an old 6 year old Probook Laptop with W7. It does take awhile to pop the dialog the first time, but after that it is instant loading faster than my desktop. This is pretty insane when you think about it. This laptop can barely run Skype, and it outperforms my desktop with C2.

— - I have edited my comment. Reread again please.

— - I have edited my comment. Reread again please.

I can confirm this issue is on Desktops too, not just laptops.

My laptop was with a fresh W10 from Microsoft too, no bloatware except for what Microsoft includes.

If it is driver related, I am not sure which ones. It does not appear to be graphics (if it is then both NVIDIA and Intel are to blame, which is not likely). Different SSDs, Motherboards, CPUs.

I doubt this is a driver issue. Although possible, but unless the issue is across multiple drivers and multiple manufacturers, at which point it would be C2 most likely as the culprit. But really, it is all speculation until C2 does some debugging.

Please be patient. This issue is only about a week old and was filed over the holidays when everyone was out of office.

I took a look at Slow.capx. It seemed OK to me. I have a high-end machine, but I ran a debug build with optimisations disabled which usually more than cancels out the fact it's a high-end machine; despite that it still opened quickly enough (I'd say ~1 second). After a few quick checks I realised the project has around 1000 global variables and most of the work opening the dialog seems to be filling the dropdown list with 1000 entries.

So all this report proves so far is "editing actions using event variables is slow if you have 1000+ variables", which is a really specific situation. It sounds like there's some confusion in this thread over what the problem really is. It seems there may be different cases which are also slow, but unless there is a separate report for those, complete with example projects and reproduction steps such as in this case, I don't have anything to work with. So please try to narrow down each individual case; it seems unlikely that everyone here has a project with 1000 global variables and are repeatedly editing actions with variable parameters.

FYI C2 lazy-creates icons, so the first time you open a dialog it goes and creates thumbnails of the objects in the project. Lazy-creating is important to avoid reaching the 10000 graphics object limit in Windows - it avoids creating icons for things that aren't used or looked at. This would be difficult to change, since if we create icons in advance, it will in some cases unnecessarily use more of the Windows limit. (In C3 we spritesheet icons so, fingers crossed, this should never be a problem ever again in C3.) Anyway, it explains why the first open is sometimes slower, but in a long session only the subsequent opens really matter, so that's what I'd prefer to focus on.

Thanks Ashley, I understand you are busy but a simple reply really helps to know it is being looked at - otherwise one has to assume you have not seen it and we have to tag you in the post again to be sure.

When you say your dialog takes about 1 second to open, is this subsequent opens too ? If so, that is part of the problem. Subsequent opens are instant on my W7 machine. It should not take 1 second to open. If it does for you, this indicates to me you will hit the second(more serious) part of the issue, where if you use the project long enough that 1 second turns into 4-5 seconds and you need to reboot the computer to regain performance. This is the same issue as far as I can tell, it is just worsened.

I would say, "so all this report proves so far is "editing actions using event variables is slow if you have 1000+ variables""

Is incorrect, given what I mentioned above. I also don't believe that is the root cause given other users feedback of the issue. Such as — who has extensively spent equal if not more time debugging this issue than me.

If there is a variable limit, this should be documented and recommendations given on how to get around it. Such as using an array for all global variables (an array containing your data, which you use a getter and setter for, similar to global variables). This is something I have been tempting to try, but have not had time yet. It also does not help a project that already has many variables as replacing them with this solution (again, not tested yet), would take many hours to get right.

As far as multiple issues and making separate reports, I have created this report for the dialog slow loading issue. I have all details I believe to be relevant in the first post to the slow loading issue. If the dialog eventually slows to 4-5 seconds and a reboot gets it back down, that is part of the same issue from my own experience. Until proven otherwise, it appears to be all the same bug so far.

Can you send me the debug build to try and collect data on my machine? Would that help at all ?

Ashley - My Windows 8.1 with no dedicated GPU, the dialogs run instantly. It was flawless. The problem must have something to do with devices only made for Windows 10.

Btw. I have tried to convert my project to C2 R228, C2 R249 and C2 215 (I think, I forgot). I could go lower but I already got my answer.

I have found out that whatever version you are in, the results are the same.

It seems that C2 is not entirely at fault. It's just C2's editor is outdated with the time and not optimized for Windows 10. Things related to Windows 10 might have changed that made C2 incompatible. Although I don't know what.

I bought this laptop just a few months ago. By that time, I did not update my project's event sheet but I noticed slow performance with the editor every time I import an object but I persisted the image import delays since I, up until now have a deadline and I thought I can manage. Besides, I have been busy more with Spriter animations at that time. But now I'm making events and my project has 2x more objects and the delays make C2 unusable.

To test my theory that this has been happening since or even before July 2017, I made a factory reset and turned off my internet connection to avoid any windows update. My Laptop's model design and factory software was released on July 2017, so I can use it as a base.

So after the factory reset, I installed C2 immediately to find out if there is still a lag. And it's still there.

Btw. I ran Windows 8.1 inside my computer with a Virtual Machine. And it worked flawlessly.

— - it takes 1 second to open every time, consistently. It has to fill a dropdown list with 1000 items every time so this is likely why. Rebooting won't affect this (it still has to fill 1000 items), and I doubt it's anything to do with icons. It would only turn to 4-5 seconds if you correspondingly had 4000-5000 global variables, which even the biggest projects ever won't get close to (a huge project would have that many events, not just variables).

So I don't see how this is a sign of anything more serious. Like I say, this seems like a very specific case, and if that's it, I don't think it's worth optimising (who has 1000 variables in one project, let alone 5000?). I think there are probably other cases that actually need optimising, but like I say, I'll need projects and repro steps for them.

— - it takes 1 second to open every time, consistently. It has to fill a dropdown list with 1000 items every time so this is likely why. Rebooting won't affect this (it still has to fill 1000 items), and I doubt it's anything to do with icons. It would only turn to 4-5 seconds if you correspondingly had 4000-5000 global variables, which even the biggest projects ever won't get close to (a huge project would have that many events, not just variables).

So I don't see how this is a sign of anything more serious. Like I say, this seems like a very specific case, and if that's it, I don't think it's worth optimising (who has 1000 variables in one project, let alone 5000?). I think there are probably other cases that actually need optimising, but like I say, I'll need projects and repro steps for them.

Ashley, sorry Ashley, but this is not what is being seen in testing. How do you explain it taking 1 second to load here, when on W7 it is instant? How long did you try the project for, to see if there was slowdown?

1000 variables are not unreasonable for a large project. I have worked on projects with 10,000's of variables that are highly efficient. This is not uncommon at all in other languages. But that is not the issue at hand currently in question. It is the load time we are experiencing. If you go through this thread, there are users reporting 3-5 second load times, and 10+ seconds. In my own VM testing, I was hitting 30 second loads and 5 second loads at times. Just like you, it only took 1 second for first couple tries.

As — has pointed out, it is not just variables but objects causing the same delay. There is also other odd behaviour experienced when this occurs, such as slow copy/pasting of variables. All dialogs lag. It is a stream of issues. I have reported just this variable dialog popping as I believe it narrows down the true issue and it is the only thing I could concretely reproduce multiple times and easily, but whatever causes this is causing a stream of issues.

Please be patient. This issue is only about a week old and was filed over the holidays when everyone was out of office.

I took a look at Slow.capx. It seemed OK to me. I have a high-end machine, but I ran a debug build with optimisations disabled which usually more than cancels out the fact it's a high-end machine; despite that it still opened quickly enough (I'd say ~1 second). After a few quick checks I realised the project has around 1000 global variables and most of the work opening the dialog seems to be filling the dropdown list with 1000 entries.

So all this report proves so far is "editing actions using event variables is slow if you have 1000+ variables", which is a really specific situation. It sounds like there's some confusion in this thread over what the problem really is. It seems there may be different cases which are also slow, but unless there is a separate report for those, complete with example projects and reproduction steps such as in this case, I don't have anything to work with. So please try to narrow down each individual case; it seems unlikely that everyone here has a project with 1000 global variables and are repeatedly editing actions with variable parameters.

FYI C2 lazy-creates icons, so the first time you open a dialog it goes and creates thumbnails of the objects in the project. Lazy-creating is important to avoid reaching the 10000 graphics object limit in Windows - it avoids creating icons for things that aren't used or looked at. This would be difficult to change, since if we create icons in advance, it will in some cases unnecessarily use more of the Windows limit. (In C3 we spritesheet icons so, fingers crossed, this should never be a problem ever again in C3.) Anyway, it explains why the first open is sometimes slower, but in a long session only the subsequent opens really matter, so that's what I'd prefer to focus on.

My project contains:

<,> or = ?5?0?0? 1000 objects in the project. Not exceeding ?1?0?0?0? 1200.

1000+ animation folders. (1000 objects)

300 to 500 layouts.

300 to 500 event sheets. + 20 eventsheets.

Less than 30 families. (Stopped using families after encountering problems with loading them in the dialog, which we all confirmed and reported)

19000 to 20,000 UID instances on entire 500 layouts.

Contains Spriter SCMLs and XMLs

I only have around 200 variables. And I have not experienced any slowdowns.

But I don't know in the future.

Although I know that Layouts and Event sheets don't cause any slowdown.

I'm not sure about variables but I know that Groups, Events and Comments also don't cause any slowdown cause I

have a lot of those.

The things that I've proven to cause slowdown are the:

+Families

and especially

+Objects in the object type folder.

Anything that pops up in the dialog, even around only 50 objects already causes a second pop-up delay.

This happens when trying to load an object when adding. editing and replacing events/objects when the dialog is about to pop-up.

1 second with 1000 variables is not bad enough to seem to need fixing. I don't see it taking any amount of time as bad as anyone else reports, especially not 10sec+, so basically this is "can't reproduce".

There may well be other cases, but what I am trying to tell you is I don't have any way to reproduce those either. I need steps to reproduce and example projects, for each potential slow case. I don't have any right now. All I've got is one edge case with variables that doesn't look particularly bad.

FYI C2 lazy-creates icons, so the first time you open a dialog it goes and creates thumbnails of the objects in the project. Lazy-creating is important to avoid reaching the 10000 graphics object limit in Windows - it avoids creating icons for things that aren't used or looked at. This would be difficult to change, since if we create icons in advance, it will in some cases unnecessarily use more of the Windows limit. (In C3 we spritesheet icons so, fingers crossed, this should never be a problem ever again in C3.) Anyway, it explains why the first open is sometimes slower, but in a long session only the subsequent opens really matter, so that's what I'd prefer to focus on.

It's strange Windows 8.1 with C2 and objects load instantly but in Windows 10 it loads 5 seconds at best.

"C2 lazy-creates icons" is not the problem. That works fine.

The problem is different, it does not load fast. Even with High PC Specs.

1 second with 1000 variables is not bad enough to seem to need fixing. I don't see it taking any amount of time as bad as anyone else reports, especially not 10sec+, so basically this is "can't reproduce".

There may well be other cases, but what I am trying to tell you is I don't have any way to reproduce those either. I need steps to reproduce and example projects, for each potential slow case. I don't have any right now. All I've got is one edge case with variables that doesn't look particularly bad.

I'll make you one! I'll make a super bloated .capx even if it costs me hours.

Just prioritize this please Ashley . I've been tweaking OS settings and registry for days now.

1 second with 1000 variables is not bad enough to seem to need fixing. I don't see it taking any amount of time as bad as anyone else reports, especially not 10sec+, so basically this is "can't reproduce".

There may well be other cases, but what I am trying to tell you is I don't have any way to reproduce those either. I need steps to reproduce and example projects, for each potential slow case. I don't have any right now. All I've got is one edge case with variables that doesn't look particularly bad.

Ashley:

How do you explain W10 taking 1 second to load, while W7 is instant? Let's tackle that first to see if it helps.

Ashley if we may ask, what specs and OS are you using to reproduce the problem?