AGS is slow???

[td]

Hey guys i was confused when i show my demo in some adventure forum and many persons told me that AGS is not best choise for creating 1-person adventure. They recomend me Adventure Maker or Scream engine. The reason why they told this was "AGS is slow"... (?)
Is that true???
Maybe this point have some true because AGS compiler create only one *.exe file and the other side Adventure Maker compiler create different files for periodically download in system memory...

[Radiant]

No. It runs and edits perfectly fine on a 350 MHz machine. I assume you have better than that?

[td]

No. It runs and edits perfectly fine on a 350 MHz machine. I assume you have better than that?

But if game is large ~ 50 Mb?

[BOYD1981]

if i remember rightly AGS does have an option to split the game up into smaller parts.
just sounds like people badmouthing AGS because they prefer another engine to me.

[Ali]

I can see why AGS might not be the first choice for a first-person adventure, because it has been geared towards third person games. Moreover, I imagine a first person game would feature fewer elements that might slow the engine down than a regular AGS game.

There are good arguments for and against the use of AGS for a first person game. The fact that this individual objected, but couldn't think of a reasonable objection suggests that you shouldn't pay much heed.

But if game is large ~ 50 Mb?

I ran Prodigal smoothly on a 200Mhz machine. I think that was over 50Mb.

[Radiant]

But if game is large ~ 50 Mb?

Absolutely. I'm writing ATOTK on a 350 MHz machine. That game is about 100 Mb.

if i remember rightly AGS does have an option to split the game up into smaller parts.

It does, but that's pretty much irrelevant to speed.

[td]

Well im sure ... AGS is a powerfull engine and have most powerfull community!!! maybe coz it free? For example Adventure Maker comminity is dead  , Poin and click dev. kit is to young yet...WintermuteEngine have NO friendly system for creators etc...

[LGM]

AGS is the best, most inuitive system to make adventures you'll find. So stop looking and make a game! :-p

[Ghost]

There's always someone from another community who'll just snipe a comment like "It's too slow, ours is better". But let's face it, today most people have machines where the speed differences between different homebrew engines are close to irrelevant.
I would pick the engine that has the most useful features. And as Radiant and Ali said: I too have sucessfully run several large games smoothly on a P200 with a lame excuse of a video card and little RAM.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

I've worked on a 1st-person game - slide-show style, like Shiver. It worked wonders, no slowdown.

AFAIK, the people who've had real gripes with the engine's speed are,

Dave GIlbert - The Blackwell legacy,
ProgZMax - Mind's Eye, and
VinceXII - Linus Bruckman

Dave, I understand, had to cut back on a couple of real cool visual effects. Prox did too, I believe, but kept most on, and on many machines there's a noticeable slowdown - not significant, but it's there. VinceXII also stocked his full of effects - and his workaround was to make them optional for the player.

None of this is about 1st-person gaming - rather, it's about advanced visual effects, which AGS might not, indeed, be ready to fully handle. But fact is, those games are out there, and damn they're enjoyable.

[edmundito]

AGS IS SLOW.

For being a 2d, typically 320x200 resolution engine, it could do a whole lot better. But we've known this for a long time. And it's not about the speed and graphics, otherwise we would be playing DOOM 3 or something like that, you know?

[Buckethead]

I can remember downloading this game with a 3d chicken and it was like 1GB. And it played just fine, nothing slow in AGS as far as my eyes see and my brain notices.

[scotch]

AGS is slow, and it isn't.

AGS performs most of its graphics operations reasonably quickly, I think. A lot of people don't seem to understand how costly a bitmap scale or an alpha blend is. When you stack them up like a lot of the more adventurous people do, then you may well get some chugging. You'll find the same thing if you code it yourself in C.

When AGS is doing 256 colour, midi music, small sprites, minimal scaling, then its requirements are comparable to say, scummvm playing Monkey Island 2 on Windows. It needs a lot more of a system than Monkey Island 2 did in DOS, but that's to be expected.

You can of course push high res graphics way faster if you use GL or D3D, making use of 3D hardware. When you consider doing that you're probably talking about another class of game... high res, 32 bit, lots of animations and effects. It'd be great if AGS allowed for 3d acceleration some day. I think it could be done quite transparently (although it would have to be unavailable in 256 colour mode). It's something to think about for the future. If you wish to make an 800x600 game, in 32 bit colour, and to make use of the more advanced graphics effects, then for now, I do think AGS can be considered inefficient.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

However, speaking from experience, 800x600 32bit 1st person *per se* offers no slowdown, even with a fullscreen GUI that's switched on at the time. Serious. It bloats the game size hugely, but unless you get real fancy with graphical effects, no slowdown.

[Dave Gilbert]

The only time I ever experienced serious slowdown in AGS was when I tried to have multiple transparent objects/layers visible at the same time.  I was trying to do something cool with the opening credits (with all the text floating in and out and moving across the screen), but it slowed my computer down to a crawl.  So I just had them fade in and out like normal.