Just a simple question reguarding events

[Bastrophian]

Does using alot of events to display graphics, like the object tiles b-e, take up alot of the games performance? Like, ONLY useing them to display objects. The events wouldn't actually have any commands running...

I think alot of newbies might learn to do this when they find they cant place a certain tile over another becuase it would delete the one under it, so they would use and event to work around it, which i think could be useful at some times....but besides being really messy, does it cause any other undesirable effects on the game?      

 

[boldpaste2]

That... is a really good question. I just got done with a system where events had no graphics and the commands don't run unless specifically called upon and it did slow down a little. My system that I made for the minigame had more then 100 events mostly idle events. If you want to look at what I got you can check my status post ^^.

Overall, I think it will slow it down regardless if it has commands or graphics though I am not fully sure on that.

 

[Andar]

yes, even without content an event takes a bit of processing (to check if there is content), and on large maps that will contribute to lag.


However, we are talking about several hundred events without content before lag gets noticable - on small or regular maps there isn't enough place for events to get laggy (of course, as soon as you enter parallel process events that can change very fast - a single badly structured parallel process can stop your entire game)


So no, unless you're making a big map you don't need to watch the regular events.


And using events this way is not messy, it's intended for several cases...

 

[Bastrophian]

yes, even without content an event takes a bit of processing (to check if there is content), and on large maps that will contribute to lag.

However, we are talking about several hundred events without content before lag gets noticable - on small or regular maps there isn't enough place for events to get laggy (of course, as soon as you enter parallel process events that can change very fast - a single badly structured parallel process can stop your entire game)

So no, unless you're making a big map you don't need to watch the regular events.

And using events this way is not messy, it's intended for several cases...

Ok, thank you very much ! Thats about all i was needing to know. Ive used events like this alot in the past, but i never really thought about how it would effect performance till today. Anyway, thanks again.

@Boldpaste2- Watched your vid, your an eventing monster, lol !!

 

[Shaz]

I'd much prefer to make new tiles if there's space available, just to avoid the "empty" event that still has to be checked to see if there are any commands to execute.


On every frame, here are the checks that are done:


Game_Map checks to see if any events need to be activated (have a different page made active)


Game_Player checks to see if the player is standing on an event that has Player/Event touch triggers


Game_Player checks to see if there is an event in front of the player that has a Player/Event touch trigger


Every time an event or the player moves, it checks to see if there is an event (or player) in the way that would prevent the movement (so if you have 5 events all set to random movement, those 5 events will do this check every time they move)


These are only the 4 examples I can think of off the top of my head. There are likely to be more. In ALL of these cases, ALL events are looked at. So if you have 60 events on your map and 50 of them are "for display only", that's 200 times in every frame that an event will be looked at to see if special processing needs to happen, when it will never trigger that special processing.


Of course those are exaggerated figures - hopefully nobody would have 50 of these on a single map.


However, the same also applies to events that have NO graphic and NO commands, where you've just put them down to restrict movement (stop a player/NPC walking into an area you don't want them to go). And I KNOW there are a few people who use those a lot (I recall one person who used a tile around all the water areas, which made it possible to walk over the water. The solution was to line the whole water channel with events to stop the player/NPCs walking onto the water - that would have been around 100 tiles pretty easily).