Help to optimize very graphics heavy game.

Can you be more specific on where the framerate is poor? , I got the odd jitter, but for the most part it ran very well, also there is no FPS indicator, so it's difficult to compare if changes are having an effect...

Every tick events can slow a game down, if they are forcing an event that is not needed every tick, text objects are also likely candidates for frame drop, I saw them in objects, but none on screen...

The framerate is pretty much consistent, with an exception of the 4th stage's beginning. That's probably caused by a minor animation overload due to all of the unoptimized pillars.

What specs does your comp have? I noticed that the two test computers getting slowdowns had a poor GPU.

I monitored the framerate using fraps.

The text thing can be a thing. I use those to print out values the game uses to spawn projectiles. I can probably just print the values to a global variable instead.

Regarding specs, pretty much all the work is done by the graphics card so that rings true, I'm running dual core 2.8 with 4 gig ram and Win XP, with ATI radeon 3400, 256 meg graphics card, most stuff runs very well on it despite being pretty old...

Definitely get rid of the text objects, as you say global var will cover that.

A text object to show Construct 2's FPS calculation, would be a good idea though, as fraps itself could be eating into your performance...

Thanks a bunch. Do you know how important a GPU's memory is to the performance, or is everything dependent on the card's number-crushing capabilities?

A good rule of thumb is have double the minimum video ram,required for the application but obviously the speed of the memory and GPU speed will have a big role in performance, especially if shaders ect are used...

the system expression "ImageMemoryUsage" gives a figure of video ram usage, but does not include sound files, that your game has many of...

If all preloaded, they could take a sizable chunk,of system ram I guess...

Having said all that,I doubt memory is your problem, I just took another look at tutorial level 4 and you have massive sprites with collisions enabled 1888 x 2816!! I am surprised it runs as well as it does, just cropped the collision boxes and got a very noticible framerate increase...

also you have a lot of every ticks that could be reworked or removed completely...

Yeah I am aware of the extreme unoptimization on this level. It's the ascending blocks you're referring to right?

Edit: Can you point out the sprites that was 1888 x 2816?

"firstbackground" is 1888 x 2816, and its not the largest...

hehehe. Oh lord. the biggest sprite on the map passes 20k in witdth. However, these sprites aren't present in the other maps, and it roughly runs the same. Can unoptimzations in one map somehow crunch performance in another? I know it sounds like a strech, but I if this was the only issue, every other level except tutorial level 4 should run smoothly?

I'll take your word for it though. Gonna rework that level asap.

Changing layout destroys any objects that are not global, so should have no effect on performance...