Framerate/CPU usage

[Tetsuo9999]

Is it normal for this game to have random spurts of slowdown (no, not the intentional slowdown from decapitations), and take up around 80% of my CPU usage? If so, is there any way I can bring that down? Hopefully the update makes the Abarghus fight and TDL run better on my crappy laptop. Thanks in advance.

[Bitmap Bureau]

That does sound high - have you got any other 2D games that you could compare it with?

[AAAAAAAA]

I have the same issues, with my CPU usage being consistently 95%-100%. On occasion the slowdown is accompanied by severe input lag.

As for other 2D games, I can run stuff like Cave Story+, Dungeons of Dredmor, Dustforce, Lone Survivor, Super Meat Boy, and plenty others without experiencing any slowdown whatsoever with CPU usage rarely exceeding 70% (and in the event that it is in the 90-100 range there's still no slowdown to speak of). The online version of this game on the [as] website doesn't give me any problems either.

I've observed that this slowdown is at its absolute worst when the title cards introducing bosses and new areas are onscreen. This is just conjecture but I also seriously think the scrolling blue/violet cloudy background present for the main tower contributes heavily to the slowdown, as whenever it switches to the red and black background for boss fights the game returns to full speed. I may have suggested this before, but an option for disabling backgrounds or at least making them static would be helpful.

edit: I also have interlacing, slowdown, and blood all turned off. An option to turn off particle effects (such as when an enemy is "vaporized") would be nifty because I've noticed this seems to contribute to the slowdown a fair bit as well.

[Tetsuo9999]

I'm glad I'm not the only one, then. I played the Abarghus fight on the free version in class this morning and was shocked at how much faster it was running. This is probably why other players are having a difficult time recording the game, too.

[Bitmap Bureau]

The purple background does include the cloud layers which means drawing several largish images with transparency, but I'd be surprised if it was slowing your machine down that much. Sounds like performance is an issue for some people though, so I'll include a "Detail" option which when set to "low" will just draw a black rectangle for the backgrounds, turn off the vaporising effect, and also not draw the player's trail.

[Ki11s0n3]

Megadev님이 먼저 게시:

The purple background does include the cloud layers which means drawing several largish images with transparency, but I'd be surprised if it was slowing your machine down that much. Sounds like performance is an issue for some people though, so I'll include a "Detail" option which when set to "low" will just draw a black rectangle for the backgrounds, turn off the vaporising effect, and also not draw the player's trail.

that sounds good, I don't get slowdown the whole time playing just little spurts here and there and big ones for Steam Overlay and fighting the boss you fight after killing the one armed ninja.

[AAAAAAAA]

Megadev님이 먼저 게시:

I'd be surprised if it was slowing your machine down that much.

Yeah, it doesn't make much sense to me either, but I can't seem to narrow it down to anything beyond what I already mentioned. I tried disabling Steam in-game thinking that might have something to do with it, but it didn't help. Hell, I even tried running the .exe from steamapps\common with absolutely no other applications running and I was still having the same issues.

Hopefully the update coming soon will alleviate some of it too, but thanks either way!

[Bitmap Bureau]

The Abarghus fight should run much more smoothly now, but the detail option has been added should you need it!

[Aetherlight]

is there any way to add quality settings like there was in the flash version? I mean... I know it runs on Adobe Air so is it sounds like it might be easy to bring out the quality settings that were native to Adobe Flash.

[Bitmap Bureau]

There's actually little point in using the Flash detail settings as they only really effect games that use vector based art and lots of effects, but I've included a detail setting in the update which turns off various things to hopefully improve the performance a bit. The quality setting is already on "low" anyway. :)

[Tetsuo9999]

Nice! Will that allow us to turn off the backgrounds and whatnot?

[Bitmap Bureau]

Yep - the "low" detail turns off backgrounds, particle effects (although blood is handled separately), and the player's trail. If there's anything else you can think off that might be worth turning off then let me know, but I think those three things should make a difference.

[AAAAAAAA]

these[i.imgur.com] ;__;

i've also noticed that tile set transitions[i.imgur.com] are pretty egregious offenders

[Bitmap Bureau]

Ah yes, good point - I've now removed tile transitions in low detail mode (ie. you'll just jump from one tileset to the next), and the message boxes will just have a black background instead of the semi-transparent one. It won't be as pretty of course, but I'm sure you won't mind!

[AAAAAAAA]

Sounds great! Thanks for responding so graciously, I feel kind of like a pain in the ass bringing all this up since performance only seems to be an issue for a small minority of us

[Bitmap Bureau]

No not at all - there's only so many machines that we're able to test the game on, so it's great to get feedback from players with different hardware. It helps me learn more about optimisation too - colour transforms, rotations and transparencies appear to be big no-ons!