167 Posts

call a friend really slows down my computer. we need a ghost or clone option or something that doesn't require so much graphic loading. computer geeks would probably have a better idea. it takes my computer 15-20 seconds per call.

Lvl 440 "Other Peoples Problem Solver!"

5565 Posts

Here are 2 things Justin has told me over the 3.5 years of this game. Took a long time to find these 2 particular things I had remembered cause I have had over 100 tickets and there is no general search ability in closed tickets.

"You weren't doing nothing during that time -- you were using friend whacks. Each friend whack causes a new friend to be loaded and animated, which takes up RAM. Those friends *may* be unloaded when changing zones, but I'm not 100% sure on the details."

but that is negated by something said in part of a ticket answer from even earlier

"Flash Player graphics are stored in vector format (swf), which means that every time a flash app draws a frame, it does a bunch of math based on formulas in the graphic to determine which pixels are which color. This is slow, especially for the amount of graphics we generally have on the screen at once, so what we do is render the graphics to bitmap once, and then simply blit those graphics onto the screen rather than calculate the vector graphics over and over. This allows us to boost the game's frame rate by 2-3x, but it comes with a cost -- bitmapped graphics take much more memory (RAM) than vector graphics do. The initial bump in RAM usage when you load the game is caused by caching all the graphics in the initial zone that you load into and caching your character (including all of its animations for all four directions you can move). Further increases in usage are caused by the caching of new graphics you come across (new zones you load, npcs, critters, bushes, etc.). We do have some code in place to unload graphics that you haven't seen in a while, but it has a few issues -- first off it has to be very careful not to unload graphics that you may encounter again soon, so it doesn't increase load times, and secondly Flash can be very reluctant to give up memory that it has already used, so in come cases even though we clear the memory, the Flash Player doesn't give it back to your computer (it just holds on to it and waits for us to fill it again)."

Lvl 440 "Other Peoples Problem Solver!"

5565 Posts

nothing we can do would make it better. The Devs could make it better. they could hve made it better 3.5 years ago if they programmed phone a friend whacks differently. I.E. Er don't need the overhead of loading someones Hat when someone else also has the same hat, and so on, and then not need to have that loaded cause we won't be seeing it again for 5 more days...
I was just pointing out that even Juatin dorsn;t know something about the game he programmed. make me laugh when I read it.