Is there a way to make Flash use more system resources?

(Nate ) #1

Hey guys! Question is in the title! I have a game that I have been working on for a little while now and I have been creating it on my I7 tower, and only really have been testing it out on this computer. When I take it to my laptop which is essentially the AMD equivalent to an I3, my laptop does not seem to like the particles… at all. Should I just turn down the particle use? Or is there some kind of script I can write to make my laptop get beefier with the RAM/CPU/GPU, as I am not really sure what is the driving force behind flash game playing.

According to the console, they both wind up using the same amount of RAM, so I was thinking it must be a CPU/GPU issue. Every other aspect runs as it should on my laptop, just when there are particle heavy areas you can see some major lag.

Thanks guys!

(BlueZumbrellas) #2

Everything in FlashPunk is rendered by the CPU, so an older/lower end one will struggle with certain effects & large image sizes.

If you’re adament about keeping the particle effects, you may need to switch to a hardware accelerated engine such as StarlingPunk or Axel. (AMD Laptops have better integrated GPUs/weaker CPUs and vice/versa for Intel).

Hope that helps!

(Ultima2876) #3

How many particles have you got going at once?

(rostok) #4

I would suggest to use either the http://www.sociodox.com/theminer/ or a self made profiler. This way you will find a bottleneck which not necessarily must be in rendering code. Another trick is to lower the framerate: if you had 60fps I guess 30 will do too (or et least make a option for low-end computers). Take a look at this presentation http://gskinner.com/talks/quick/ - quite a good read for AS3 developers.

(Ultima2876) #5

Also check out Adobe Scout - http://gaming.adobe.com/technologies/scout/

(Nate ) #6

Thanks for all of the input guys! Sorry I am just getting back to this thread now! I will definitely look into the Adobe Scout!

I am probably handling my particles in a not so hardware friendly way, here is an example of how I make my blood splatter effect:

var i:int = 150;
while (i --)
emit.emit("blood", x + 14, y + 90);