8 FPS??? Increasing game performance

[Pickle]

If your system is running choppy while your game is running, it might not be a problem with the engine or with your computer - it could just be your setup. While in general Eclipse is a reasonably fast engine, there are some performance bottlenecks to look out for.

First - making each of your tilesets 50 megabytes is a big no-no. When the engine loads, it loads all of your graphics into memory to display. If you have 200 mb worth of graphics, and your user has 256 mb of RAM, you can bet the computer will slow down. Sometimes if you have a lot of tiles, it can't be helped - but a good rule of thumb is to only use what you need.

The engine also loads all the maps, items, and npcs into memory on startup - if you have 20 maps and your MAX_MAPS is 500, that's 480 empty maps you're loading. An extra 50 maps or items won't hurt, but again, it's good to only use what you need.

If you're getting LAGGGGGGGGG (by the way, how is that pronounced? Lag-guh-guh-guh?), sometimes it's just a slow connection somewhere - but if you're playing World of Warcraft on your server computer, that's gonna cause a bit of laggage, especially if you're on a network. Any given connection can only handle so much data at once, and if you're keeping a dedicated server going it's a good idea to not do too many internet-heavy things on it. Again, don't get me wrong - you can run Internet Explorer, just try not to download or upload too much when you can.

So - there are some general tips for speeding up Eclipse. Let me know if they help you out.

Cheers