Worried about increasing preview times.

TiAm & DrewMelton I mentioned earlier that both my machines use above-average SSD's + good CPUs and I still had projects with 10+ second preview times. I'm sure SSD's help a little but it looks like we need more optimizations on C2's part.

TiAm & DrewMelton I mentioned earlier that both my machines use above-average SSD's + good CPUs and I still had projects with 10+ second preview times. I'm sure SSD's help a little but it looks like we need more optimizations on C2's part.

Maybe you preview more often than me, but I wouldn't consider that excessive for a large game. OTOH, having to wait 45 seconds like DrewMelton would drive me nuts.

lol I swear no one actually reads my posts around here.

Tokinsom could you describe your project a bit? how many sounds, images etc you have?

lol I swear no one actually reads my posts around here.

Whoops...

shinkan Our current project (7 sec preview) is a retro game with ~1000 small, cropped sprite frames and ~10 tilemaps/textures. Without audio the approximate download in the editor is 530kb and the animations/textures folders are ~1mb combined.

It's very well optimized. Not sure what else I can say. As I mentioned earlier removing audio / disabling audio pre-load didn't seem to make a difference.

"~1000 small, cropped sprite frames" i think that can be an issue here, cause preview do not make any spreadsheeting or whatever, so the engine needs to transfer all of that to the browser (or other platform), but it's just my guess I can be wrong.

Tokinsom

I skimmed through the post... I did not see this answer but I skimmed fast and might have missed it.

Two things:

1) Is your anti virus turned on? If so try turning it off.

2) Is indexing turned on? If so, try turning it off.

See if that helps. If so, fine tune the indexing and anti virus so they avoid your project files.

Ashley

Would "preview without sound/music" mode help? Sometimes I need to check just collisions or animations.

What about "preview low res" mode? In Adobe After Effects, down sampling can be choosed for the preview.

[quote:or2joyv9]At the quarter resolution setting, the program only renders every fourth pixel, and then scales up the result to fit in the Composition panel. This allows it to build the preview much faster and can be helpful for reviewing complex animations. This lowered resolution is for preview purposes only; it does not affect the final output quality when you output your file.

Don't know if it's possible or how difficult it'd be to add, but that "no sound mode" looks pretty easy.

My projects are pretty big atm with whole music tracks and I have no experience in long preview loading times. All my games loads in under 5 seconds on all my machines. So I don't think C2 is the main problem.

Personally, I think it is just an issue with having lots of animations or frames. I didn't notice the project taking that long to preview until I started adding in my full animations. Like I said, I don't even have any sounds yet.

DrewMelton Yeah that seems to be the case. It's more about the image count than the image size or audio. This would explain why my old project (using sprite frames acting as tiles) would take so long to preview - it had to load literally thousands each time. And as shinkan said, there's no spritesheeting outside of the exported build. It has been mentioned C3 will spritesheet everything so we might just have to wait :T

— I'm using Windows 8.1 which has windows defender. No anti-virus installed at the moment. Never messed with indexing before...I'll take a look.

Tokinsom,

Not that I think is an issue for you, but nice to know that windows has a 10,000 object limit. Sounds like a lot, and 10,000 is a lot, but a lot less than you think. Especially when it comes to games. What other applications you got open when you running preview? It all adds up.

But it could be anything really.

DUTOIT 1,000 frames for an entire project is a lot less than it sounds. We use as few as possible - it's supposed to look like an NES game! I think all we can do is wait for C3 where (to my knowledge) sprites will use sheets/atlases instead of 1-file-per-frame.

Tokinsom,

Not that I think is an issue for you, but nice to know that windows has a 10,000 object limit. Sounds like a lot, and 10,000 is a lot, but a lot less than you think. Especially when it comes to games. What other applications you got open when you running preview? It all adds up.

But it could be anything really.

Does that 10,000 limit include animations as well? If so that's a major bummer.

I mean, look at this interview for Baldur's Gate II

Q: How many frames of animation are there in the game?

A: : At last count there were roughly 108,420 frames of character and monster animations rendered for Baldur's Gate at BioWare for your viewing pleasure. We are adding 171,000 more frames for BGII:SoA. This does not include things like animated water, waving flags or other animated objects of any kind.

And that game came out in 2000. That was 15 years ago.