Re: Xenotake (Vosmug game)
- Why does this take so much memory? Does it just pre-load every enemy and every level before startup? Does gamemaker not allow loading screens?
Game Maker, by default, will preload everything into memory, yes, and have no loading screens.
For it to not do that, you have to work around it intentionally. Kind of like how Hounds of the Blade and Nanocrisis did (and I believe you HAVE to have separate files for every resource for it to do so). It's not something you just say "Hey, do loadings", but I don't believe it's
that hard, either. A game like Hounds of Blade would probably break 4gb or more, though, as the compressed game has almost 800mb. But if you go around and try to add this to a finished game, you're going to have a bad time. It's best to do this from the start or not at all.
But even then I don't think Game Maker is too optimized and should be using a bit more memory than really needed anyway. I had tried a simple tower defense game with very few resources and it already consumed about 200mb.
And how much memory is "so much memory" for you? I don't think I know anyone with less than 2gb ram right now, and average seems to be 3~4gb. In first world countries, that probably jumps right to 8gb. Is this game using up more than 1gb?
-I'm not sure about the "so much memory" thing; I was able to go into the Alien Prison and spawn around 1,000+ enemies while rendering videos, streaming video, uploading videos, compressing videos, with 50+ tabs open in two browsers, and Skype, without any FPS drop. (Running 8gb ram, 3ghz i7) Might just be pretty old computer, I'm guessing.
Another thing about game maker games is that they only use one thread. I've seen ways of using more than one, but they hardly seem worth it for the average game (I think it might also have been buggy). Games, and particularly 2d games, do not have that much use for processing power. It might change in the next years, as now consoles actually have something resembling processing power.
A modern CPU like yours should not have issues multitasking, even if it had to reserve a whole core to the game alone.
If you open the processes tab on task manager, however, you can just check how much ram and CPU the game is actually using. If the game used 15% or more of a quad core 3ghz machine, you could guess it wouldn't run too well on computers below 1.8ghz, as it's needing 60% of a 3ghz core.
