The flash plugin takes over 1gb of memory when I am playing. This seems pretty high for a browser game of this kind. I am using Firefox 3.5.1 and Flash 10.
I noticed the same thing the other day when I running in firefox 3.5. I'm trying in IE to see if its better.
This could be related to the flash player runtime overflow error = crash. Could be a blunder in programming's side since the vectors don't move much.
A easy way to catch this is to watch flash memory usage as you play.
The game will use quite a bit of memory depending upon how large you make your game window. The game uses all Vector artwork so that you can scale the game to as small or large (fullscreen) window as you like. However, we do bitmap cache the background graphics, which vastly helps the performance of the animations when the game window is large, and this inevitably results in large memory usage (i.e. we trade ram usage for performance).
Still, it is a concern to us if this is resulting in crashed Flash players and ruined game experiences. If memory is being leaked (or not restored) after successive games are played, this is definately a bug. We've included an option in the game menu settings to show memory and FPS that can help you monitor memory leaks. Note that the memory will not necessarily yield the true usage (since it doesn't grab the Active X data in IE) but it may help to show leaks if you see the number increasing indefinately. For a more accurate memory check, use Windows Task Manager. Please keep us posted on updates or possible issues. We will be doing our best to resolve this.
The usage looked a bit better when I tried IE last night using the latest version but I still get slowdown. I usually kill dice roll animations to help speed gameplay.
Is there any way to disable animations or other features to improve performance?
Rokendo- could you provide your system specs for us? We'd like to do some testing on a comparable machine to see if we can duplicate your results and help optimize performance.
I notice that during my first game, memory usage tends to jump up to 89 - 90MB and does not clear after the game ends. If I play a second, the usage hops up to around 120MB or so. If I try a third, I crash.
Hey Ross,
I suspect this might be caused by cacheAsBitmap, that it takes a snapshot of the vectors and store it in your "ram" memory. Every time you start a new game, it could take another snapshot of everything, and not clearing the previous cache. Try clearing out the caches upon ending a game or something. Try .cacheAsBitmap = false and see if that solves the problem.
Keep me updated about this, I'm curious to know.
When I had really bad lag,
I was using an old laptop 1.8 GHZ, 170 Meg HD, 1 GIG RAM when I had severe issues.
I've been using my other machine ( dual core 1.8 GHZ, 1 GIG RAM) and it seems to run better in IE.
When I run in firefox, I notice that memory usage builds to around 500 meg.
If I get my old laptop again, I'll try to pull more exact specs.
Thanks for the tips guys- we apologize for the inconvenience. There is definately a memory leak issue which we'll get all fixed up after GenCon. Please keep us informed with as much info as possible. In the meantime, we recommend refreshing your browser between games to prevent any crashes.