Very low FPS

[Rokannon]

Hello!

I am experiencing big problems with game performance on my AMD Ryzen 9 3900X with 64Gb of RAM. I am having 2-3 FPS when I flip book pages. The game is barely playable. Flipping pages works OK when no content on current or next page. Probably something with text rendering. I have severe lags during text dialogs but sometimes it works OK for 3 seconds and then switches back to choppy gameplay.

What I tried:
- Lowering render quality in game settings
- Playing in window mode
- Lowering monitor screen resolution
- Adding game folder to windows defender exclusions

As an ex-Flash-developer myself I understand how unfortunate it might have been for you to choose a dead technology for such a great handcrafted game. But as far as I see you've put the game into a self-contained executable so performance should not be that bad even though Flash is no longer supported. Especially in window mode with low quality mode.

I have a 4K monitor which might affect the game somehow. But as I said before I did try lowering the resolution. It really feels like something is wrong with text rendering.

Please help.

[Rokannon]

OK, I decided to blow dust of my Flash-development skills. I've installed Adobe Scout and did some basic profiling. Here's a screenshot:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/c1uhfefgvei8l4c/the_dream_machine_adobe_scout_profiling.png?dl=0

As you can see in the middle of the screenshot - there's a major FPS drop (3.5 FPS). I reproduced it by opening a book in the game and did a single page flip. I see that "DisplayList Rendering" operation takes about 250ms every frame. If I dive deeper I see that top activity that eats up the frame time is called "Rasterizing Edges". Everything else is good.

First thing you should look into is usage of any vector graphics that has to be rasterized by flash-engine on every frame. Especially fonts. I may suspect that you already use some font rasterization technique but it's seem like it is falling back to vector graphics on my machine for some reason.

You can have a look at my profiling data yourself here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/akxuv3h03ge0vm5/the_dream_machine_adobe_scout_profiling.flm?dl=0

Regards,
Vladimir

[Cockroach]

Thanks Vladimir!

I think you're right. This is probably a text rasterization issue.

I'll see if I can do some workaround. Hopefully that'll help.

Cheers,

- a

[Cockroach]

I've made changes to Mr Morton's notebook (Chapter 4 & 5). Try it out and see if it helps.

[Rokannon]

Hello!

I've just tested the very same scenario and I can confirm that this issue is fully resolved. Dialogue animation lags are gone as well.

Thank you very much, sir. I can know return to playing this masterpiece.

Best regards,
Vladimir

[tylor]

It's basicly dropping 2 fps everywhere, even on setting menu.

[Cockroach]

What resolution are you running the game at? Try lowering it.

[tylor]

Originally posted by Cockroach:

What resolution are you running the game at? Try lowering it.

1080p, I've tried caps fps on radeon software. Helped a bit but still fps dropping when I click object or at conversations.

[gimp]

ive also experienced this intense frame drop. it happens in menus, and in the game inventory, and when dragging items to use in the world. outside of those actions, there is no lag. 1080 res also. but i am using an Nvidia

[Ilovemyhouse]

Originally posted by gimp:

ive also experienced this intense frame drop. it happens in menus, and in the game inventory, and when dragging items to use in the world. outside of those actions, there is no lag. 1080 res also. but i am using an Nvidia

Same thing, I use a GTX 1650Ti btw, and task manager didn't showed more than 20% usage.

[Cockroach]

Thanks guys! Your detailed descriptions about when these lags occur have given me a pretty localized target.

[Ilovemyhouse]

I'm not a game maker, but maybe it's the graphics API, you probably use DirectX (for Windows), but I don't know if it would work better with Vulkan. (if you can export it to Vulkan)

[Nice to Have]

Yes, confirmed, dragging inventory items into the game world creates huge fps drops. (1080p)

[Uollie]

I'm also having really low FPS seemingly any time text is displayed on the screen. I got through chapter 1 only slightly annoyed, but chapter 2 going through the books tanks the game down to 1 fps.

I can't really play further than this until I come across a fix. Any ideas?

[Zee]

I've also been having the same fps drop issue when menus, text or icons are rendered, after the game runs for a little while. It seems if you exit the game and restart, the issue will fix itself, but it'll return after awhile.

I thought it might be a memory leak, but task manager shows ram / vram to be more or less the same whether the drops occur or not. The game runs in flash, correct? I've heard similar issues with menus causing dropped frames in flash emulators/replacements, no idea if the two are related.

Been otherwise enjoying the game so far, despite having to restart it now and then.

[Rana]

2022 and the issue never went away. I'm not sure why I'd bother with the new UI when the old one worked fine. 

At least update the system requirements on the store front if the game is going to run that badly.

EDIT:

I kinda fixed the FPS drop issue. Right-click anywhere in the game to access the settings menu and disable hardware acceleration. The game doesn't use GPU anymore and seems to rely more on CPU from here (I can only assume this is software render mode), but at least it fixed random stutter, though with the downside of no steam overlay, which is fine for me.
While we're on the subject of game engines, use Unreal or Unity instead of something as ancient and crude as Adobe Flash, which was used to power the 2008 Xat Chatter Box. Sure bring back old memories.