Topic: I hate when Game Maker makes me look like a chump

[TheouAegis]

Logically, no matter which way you look at it, tiles are faster than objects. You don't have to cycle through all the indexes. You don't have to sort through all the drawing layers. You don't have to check each and every one during collision time. Tiles are much faster than objects.

Or so I thought.

I have no idea why tiles fuck up the FPS so horribly in Game Maker -- at least GM8 -- but loading a room with 100 objects resulted in less of a frame drop than loading it with five 64x64 tiles that were the only tiles in a 64x64 tilesheet. It was actually twice as fast using 100 objects compared to five tiles! What the fuck man?! GPU load? Not according to GPU-Z. My GPU load was apparently higher when the game was running faster. CPU load? Nope, same thing -- higher CPU load when running faster. I converted the whole tile layer to a background. Yes, a background as large as the entire room. It ran 3x faster than the room with tiles. THREE TIMES FASTER!!!!



Incidentally, hiding the tile layer had the same results as deleting the tile layer. That's good news for me in a fucked up way. If I'm really lucky, my next hypothesis will still let me work with the tile-to-background method in my games, but god this is such a pain in the ass. Fuck you Game Maker!

[Lelygax]

They fixed it in newer versions? It doesnt make sense to me either.

[TheouAegis]

I don't know if it was fixed in newer versions. Someone will have to check that for me, since I refuse to upgrade.

BUT THERE IS GOOD NEWS!!!!

tile_layer_hide() doesn't stop you from still interacting with the tiles, so you could, for example, use tile_get_left(tile_layer_find(1000000,x,y))! It seems tiles themselves are still probably actually faster than objects, but drawing the tiles is slower. ... Jackie Chan is exasperated by that too.

[Lelygax]

But this will hide tiles? If so this turns tiles in a useless method doesnt it?

[TheouAegis]

Hides them, but doesn't make them obsolete. GM will ignore the tiles, but they're still there. As long as your room isn't larger in any one direction than the surface limits (I think 2 megs, which seemed to be automatically allocated in full according to my CPU and GPU monitors), then you can just convert the tiles to a background when you're not changing them. When you need to change them, you delete the background, show the tile layer (which is still there, just invisible), alter the tiles you need to, recreate the surface, set all instances to invisible, redraw the screen (which is just the tiles and backgrounds and such), save the surface as the new background, hide the tile layer, make all the instances visible again, and you're done. ... ... If you have some instances that are invisible to begin with, you might want to deactivate those ones first so they don't get made visible again accidentally. But no tiles aren't pointless, just... not worth drawing.

Also, in a game forced to run at 60 fps (which you should since that's what most consoles ran at), you wouldn't notice the tile slowdown at all. The lowest my demo dropped was 115 FPS with the view completely filled with tiles and a moving object.

[Lelygax]

Well, this last explanation was pretty good but since you will need to do all these sort of things if you choose to hide tiles, it wasnt better to simple use backgrounds instead of tiles? I know that collision can be goofy this way, but then you can draw a invisible background only for collision and it will be much faster, isnt it? (This option only applies if you are going to use hidden tiles, of course)

[TheouAegis]

The difference is you would need to load all those backgrounds into the game file itself. The backgrounds themselves could still be comprised simply of tiles. Yes, you're loading the backgrounds into the RAM, but you're not loading ALL the backgrounds into the RAM. You only need one background and that background will only exist for the current room. When you change rooms, you'll need to replace that background with the next surface.

In other words, you could make 30 rooms from 10 tile sets. To ignore tiles and just use backgrounds, you would need 30+ background files, each of which would be saved in/with the executable and loaded into the RAM (this was kinda resolved in Studio, if I read the comments right). With tiles, only the 10 tile sets would be saved and loaded. One tile set could be 128x256 pixels in size, while one room could be 1024x448 in size, for example. For the sake of argument, assume all tile sets are the same size and all rooms are the same size. In a game with 30 rooms, that'd be 1,280KB for tile sets or 53,760KB for backgrounds, if I did my math right. That's a 4200% difference, 1.25MB vs. 52.5MB.

Also, you can still use those hidden tiles to write a tile collision map. So no, it hardly makes tiles useless. Far from it. It just makes working with them tedious. Like I said, too, if you force the game to run at 60FPS, the drawing handicap isn't noticeable. I never knew how slow tiles were until I set my room speed to 1000. Even without tiles, the fastest my computer would let me run a room was 550 FPS. ... I guess my graphics card sucks.

Also remember FPS is how fast the game is drawn, not executed. For some reason, GM can't handle drawing tiles even though it can handle drawing objects. However the rest of a step is still faster when using tiles instead of objects. So while using objects will make your Draw phase faster, it will make your Step phase slower. It also makes room start-up slower too because GM has to handle all those Create events and then deactivate everything (which I don't particularly agree with, since the speed drop with activating/deactivating can potentially negate any benefits).

[Lelygax]

 So basically its one more of your series "things that is useless for hte majority of people, but are fun to know"? Its good to know that, but it will not affect almost no one in a bad way right? Anyway, I prefer tiles, preferably appearing on screen, but I dislike tedious things (various things in making a game is already tedious enough xD).

 When I try to do some game, I plan to use some standard tile, make this standard set invisible and then set something like that (I will explain in human language): If this area is in the graveyard, create graveyard tiles in front of these standard ones. This seems obsolete or "strange"?

[Inccubus]

I don't know if it was fixed in newer versions. Someone will have to check that for me, since I refuse to upgrade.

BUT THERE IS GOOD NEWS!!!!

tile_layer_hide() doesn't stop you from still interacting with the tiles, so you could, for example, use tile_get_left(tile_layer_find(1000000,x,y))! It seems tiles themselves are still probably actually faster than objects, but drawing the tiles is slower. ... Jackie Chan is exasperated by that too.

You know, you can have GM8 and GM Studio installed at the same time with no ill effects. They are completely separate.

[Lelygax]

But that costs money if you are going to follow the rules...

[Inccubus]

There is a free version that has limitations. Plus if you're not gonna publish anything I don't see anything wrong with "acquiring" a temp copy for testing purposes. And if it really weighs on your conscience you can always pay for it later.

[Lelygax]

Well, these temp copies almost always become a permanent one here (I really need a job xD). But even if I gonna release something it will be for free anyways. This GM Studio is very different than the normal GM? Im asking it out of curiosity, because I only knows how to use (basic things) MMF2 anyways.

[Inccubus]

The interface is pretty much the same as GM8. There are a few tweaks here and there with a bunch of features that GM8 doesn't have like being able to set the size of the texture pages and other useful things. The big difference is that an ass-load of functions have been replaced. Like Theou has mentioned at first they axed features that didn't work on certain platforms to make things more uniform. However, many of them have been replaced with new functions since certain features were very popular. You'll notice that the help file is structured a bit differently too.

[TheouAegis]

So basically its one more of your series "things that is useless for hte majority of people, but are fun to know"?

If you're referring to being able to interact with tiles, that's actually not such a minority thing anymore and is being pushed by the GM:Studio developers as well. If you're talking about knowing tiles are slower at high room speeds, it's very important to know. There are quite a few people these days making games that [are intended to] run at 400-600 FPS (God only knows why). Having even just 5 tiles on the screen will cause major slowdown in GM, even if you don't do anything with them.

[Lelygax]

@Inccubus
Thanks, it seems that Theou now can atleast check for differences them if he want, since I dont use this program oftenly I doubt that I would find great differences and even so it would not benefit me in nothing by discovering them (not for now).

If you're talking about knowing tiles are slower at high room speeds, it's very important to know.

Yes that part, I labeled it with this kind of title because you staarted doing that in some of your past posts, like "useless something" when they really are interesting, only not useful for everyone, but a bunch of people can benefit from it.

There are quite a few people these days making games that [are intended to] run at 400-600 FPS (God only knows why). Having even just 5 tiles on the screen will cause major slowdown in GM, even if you don't do anything with them.

And thats why I said its not useful for everyone, since not everyone wants to do things like that I think.