Mouse + animation dilemma....

[Jay S.]

Whenever I play a long animation in GE and move the mouse simultaneously, the frame rate of the animation decreases. This is what I'm talking about:

I made an AVI movie, then extracted all the frames as individual image files. Next, I made these files an animation to play in GE. And it works quite decently, but whenever the mouse is moved the fps of the animation slows down, making a quite dumb looking animation... And, oddly enough, when the mouse in GE is disabled, when the mouse is moved this doesn't occur.

I doubt this is a fixable problem, but I thought I'd mention it to see what anyone else thinks about it....

[Game A Gogo]

How strong is your computer? (CPU, ram, V-ram)
How big is the animation? (Size and number of frames)

Those are important variables.

[Jay S.]

I have a quite decently fast computer -- 2.53GHz CPU, 512 of RAM... And the animation.... 136 x 93 pixels, and around 600 frames.... But it doesn't really matter, though; as long as I can design around this principle, it should be OK, actually. At least it works best when the cursor is gone (which is most important for my case.) I just wondered if this was a common issue of GE or not. (I haven't had any other probs like this except for this case, though, so probably not.)

I hope GE supports movie files in the future....

[Game A Gogo]

well, i can't see the problem, I had an animation 800x600 and it contained 250frames (I don't think that it should matter much) and i have the same spec as you, doesn't lag :\

[Jay S.]

Did it occur for you when you moved the mouse cursor (if it was enabled)? I also noticed that, I think, if you have a higher screen resolution that also aggravates it. For example, as far as I can tell, I've had less problems with 320 x 240 than with 640 x 480 (which is the resolution of my project.)

[makslane]

I will investigate this issue, thanks.

[Jay S.]

Thank you, Makslane. I've done some experimenting around with it, and I think it even happens with a large animation of the such using Key down events... there might even be more. But if you could check into that, that'd be great.

[makslane]

Can you send me the game with this problem?

[Jay S.]

Sorry, Makslane, I can't: even when I compress it to .ZIP or . RAR it's 6 MB.

[makslane]

Send to my email.

[Jay S.]

Oh, OK. But before I do, however, I want to ask you, Makslane, something: I have GE version 1.3.2.

Will you be able to open it?

[makslane]

Sure! But in this case, is better you download the demo version and test yourself.

[Jay S.]

Makslane: sorry that I haven't replied to you in a while, but I've been veeeeeery busy and I haven't even had time to do so. Anyway, I've decided instead of e-mailing you, I redid the file so it has a smaller animation (thus smaller in size.) So, here it is. I made it especially for your testing; when you move the mouse cursor, watch the animation playing very closely, and if you do, while the mouse is moving, the animation slows down. Also, when you move the arrow keys it will move the Pakman actor on the screen; the animation slows down even while the actor moves....

[makslane]

I can't see the problem here.
Get the latest Game Editor demo version and tell me if the problem keeps happen.

[Jay S.]

I downloaded the demo of the latest version, and, it's still happening... Perhaps it's just my computer (for some reason) and not all other computers have the problem. Strange...

Well, thank you for your time, Makslane.