14-Hour Compile Times and OGG importing

[Shael Riley]

It takes 14 hours to compile my < 200-meg-game. During compiles, the compiler will whiz through dozens of oggs--I'm making a music game, so there's a lot of ogg importing happening with every compile--taking only a split second to import each, and then, arbitrarily, the compile window will pause on one ogg, no larger in file size than any of those it took a split second to import, and hang for over a half hour at a time, only to eventually resume and import many more oggs in a split second. Additionally, it doesn't pause on the same oggs every compile--the oggs that take a long time vary, seemingly at random, changing with each new compile; that is to say, an ogg that took a tenth of a second to compile last time might take 45 minutes this time, and vice versa.

Any idea what's going on? Compiles this egregiously slow are effectively halting my game's development.

[darksouls]

:( man that stinks.
Does game maker handle .pak file reading? maybe try archiving your audio into one folder if it does.

[Sera]

Before Studio I would've actually recommended leaving your main audio tracks out of the game entirely, and still might depending on your target platform. The huge changes to both the audio engine and the file handling since I last implemented such a thing leave me wondering if that's even still a proper option, but I can't imagine it's completely barred.

If you can get it working, you can omit a bunch of lengthy BGM tracks from your project entirely, loading in the ones that are needed and swapping them out as need be. Historically I've found this really useful, since GM has a long history of choking on large sound files come compile time (and usually I'd be working with an alternate sound engine anyway, since the OGG support is a pretty recent thing). If the file functions prove less than useful, maybe see if Included Files throws you a bone somehow. That'd be my present best shot at it.

[darksouls]

You could try telling your game to parse its audio list to an external file/folder , but im not sure about xml parsing in Game Maker.

[FreshWaterFern]

I have some tips to cut down compile time.
1. If you don't edit any sprites/background/fonts, it won't recompile all the texture pages.
2. If you don't edit any of the audio files, it won't recompile the audio files.
3. Faster compile times are based on harddrive speed, CPU speed, and Memory Speed.

I've suggested to Russel, (one of the main developers of Game Maker) that they only compile the textures needed to be compiled and it was accepted into the future updates, so in the future you can expect faster compile times. As much of a difference as 200% increase in speed during compilation.

I personally get compile times under 10 seconds no matter what.