My project has some animation that works great on most test machines, but a
little slowly on a few. I need to figure out why the few are not behaving
as intended.
Project specs:
800x600
16 bit color
Windows
I'm animating five sprites at certain times during my project. Two of the
sprites are mice (the rodent kind). One is a light that toggles on and off.
The other two are hands of a clock that rotate.
All this is managed by objects that get member names and sprite locs from
lists stored in cast members. When the animation is playing, stepFrame
handlers determine from the lists whether or not the non clock sprites need
updating and if so, update them.
The clock hands, which are antialiased, are constantly rotating. The rest
of the graphics are 16 bits. One of the mice moves quite often and it's
cast member changes frequently, maybe on a quarter of the frames. (This all
takes place in a single frame in the score.) The other two members don't
have much activity. None of the five sprites are ever as large as 40x40
pixels, often they're less than half that.
There needs to be an exact synchronization between the elements of the
animation and some audio that's playing. In most cases, it's working
perfectly. But on some machines, the animation lags behind where it should
be relative to the audio. On my year old XP box, it runs flawlessly. On my
other machine, a 5 1/2 year old Pentium II 266Mhz with 128MB RAM, running
NT4, the animation works just as well. But on the client's 4 year old Win
98 machine with far more free RAM and a faster CPU than the NT box, the
animation can't keep up. The machine can't draw the screen as fast as it
needs to in order to synch properly.
Text on the screen highlights following the same audio. Highlight changes
occur when an on cuePassed handler sends a message to the relevant text
sprite. On this Win98 machine, the highlights tend to draw just a bit later
than they should on my fast machine. On the aforementioned NT box, it works
perfectly.
I've slowed the tempo to 10fps during the animation so that there's as much
time as possible to execute the stepFrame and exitFrame activities.
All but the audio files are on the hard drive. The audio is on a CD.
It doesn't seem like I'm asking that much of these machines to perform the
animations. I've probably seen it run on a dozen machines of varying
speeds. On almost all, it's run fine, but on some it doesn't and the
pattern doesn't exactly follow clock speed. Again, on my old NT box, it
runs great. But not on a couple newer, faster machines.
Is this likely a video card issue? (I upgraded the Win 98 machine to
DirextX 9 and its latest drivers to little avail) Something else?
I haven't included any code because it's scattered among a number of
different scripts, but that can be addressed if need be.
I'll appreciate any thoughts on this matter.
[To remove yourself from this list, or to change to digest mode, go to http://www.penworks.com/lingo-l.cgi To post messages to the list, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Problems, email [EMAIL PROTECTED]). Lingo-L is for learning and helping with programming Lingo. Thanks!]
