One fine day I decided to see how well my game ran in 800x600, so I made a new interface graphic, spent a lot of time making it work, etc. Worked like a charm, and the game was still totally smooth.

So I started playing around with adding necessary components to my game. The first was a spell hotkey system (later ditched) that actually worked rather well. The second was a series of main locations displayed on starting a new game that allowed the player much more flexibility in creating his character than the silly, almost completely uncustomizeable built in dice rolling system. After adding a mere fraction of the main locations required, and none of the attached stat changing events, I found two major problems:

1. After clicking any links in the character creation dialogues, the next main location graphic utterly failed to load (just a black screen) with the exception of it's local events.

2. The game was suddenly really really choppy.

I tried going back to the normal Coldstone way of doing things, to no avail. In any event, that's really not an option for this game. Anyone know what's going on here?

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Non cognosco quo modo dicere linguam latinam bene.

Quote

Originally posted by LoneIgadzra:
**One fine day I decided to see how well my game ran in 800x600, so I made a new interface graphic, spent a lot of time making it work, etc. Worked like a charm, and the game was still totally smooth.

So I started playing around with adding necessary components to my game. The first was a spell hotkey system (later ditched) that actually worked rather well. The second was a series of main locations displayed on starting a new game that allowed the player much more flexibility in creating his character than the silly, almost completely uncustomizeable built in dice rolling system. After adding a mere fraction of the main locations required, and none of the attached stat changing events, I found two major problems:

1. After clicking any links in the character creation dialogues, the next main location graphic utterly failed to load (just a black screen) with the exception of it's local events.

2. The game was suddenly really really choppy.

I tried going back to the normal Coldstone way of doing things, to no avail. In any event, that's really not an option for this game. Anyone know what's going on here?

**

can't tell you specifically what's going on in your game, haven't seen it but one small piece of advice, THe people at Beenox tend to use a small map composed of simple 32x32 black tiles,they use it to free up memory in between maps,during a fade to black sequence, just a little maintenence technique, and i don't know to what extenet this would help but this could be used quite often.

either way your loading a significantly more demanding opening sequence of events,loading a series of (4ż?) mainLocations one after the other. YOur game just might require more memory ::

are you using .png graphics(use up a lot of memory, at least in the animation editor) ? .jpg(beenox refers to this as a destructive format)?

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(url="http://"http://www.geocities.com/ellrx/index.html")eLL' softWare: updated 10.08.02(/url)

I'm just using picts, and I've tried adding more memory, which also accomplished nothing. I'll try the small black map thing maybe...

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Non cognosco quo modo dicere linguam latinam bene.

So why would my framerate suddenly drop when I add my interface graphic and switch to 800x600 when I know my computer can do better? I've tested this extensively. The problem always shows itself after I've switched the resolution, changed the interface, and moved all the interface fields to the correct new locations. The puzzler is that I followed the exact same process with my first interface graphic, and the game ran fine.

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" Turn towards the trees! "
"What trees? There's ******* trees EVERYWHERE!!!"
- A friend and I sailing one lazy afternoon. I was out of my mind with exasperation at my friend's steering ability.

Quote

Originally posted by LoneIgadzra:
The puzzler is that I followed the exact same process with my first interface graphic, and the game ran fine.

This may be a dumb question, but it would seem to me that the question to ask is: what's the difference between the first interface graphic and this one?

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I don't know what I'm talking about.
(url="http://"http://homepage.mac.com/glennfield/ColdstoneBugs.html")Coldstone 1.0.1 Bug List(/url) - last update 10/10/2002

Quote

Originally posted by Glenn:
**This may be a dumb question, but it would seem to me that the question to ask is: what's the difference between the first interface graphic and this one?

**

I would have mentioned that, but the problem actually showed istelf when I had used the (url="http://"http://www.route26.com/te/images/cd800x600.jpg")old graphic(/url) for a while. The new placeholder has interface elements along both the top and bottom of the screen.

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" Turn towards the trees! "
"What trees? There's ******* trees EVERYWHERE!!!"
- A friend and I sailing one lazy afternoon. I was out of my mind with exasperation at my friend's steering ability.

(This message has been edited by LoneIgadzra (edited 10-25-2002).)

Here's a puzzler:

I created the simplest interface graphic possible without having none, i.e. a grey bar at the bottom, at a size of 800x600 and inserted it into my game. Oddly, the problem has been solved. Is minor masking and statistic displaying really that hard for Coldstone, or might my graphic have been messed up in a way that slowed it down or what?

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The autotrophic organisms are decidedly more verdent when located on an adjacent surface.