Hey everyone! You already know what time it is (pssst, if you don’t, the answer is ‘devlog time’). Let’s not waste any more time and go ahead and get into it!

Sweet Mountain Mission 3 Back in Production!

For those of you that read last week’s devlog you probably remember that a performance issue forced me to put editing Mission 3 of Sweet Mountain on hold. I’m excited to announce that this issue has been resolved and Mission 3 is currently back in full production.

It appears that the cause of the issue is that GameMaker can only handle so many instances being on the same layer. In Sweet Mountain Act 1 (which is what Mission 3 is based on) there were over 1800 instances all existing on the same layer. For those who are unaware, an “instance” represents an object within the game, such as springs, rings, enemies, and even Sonic himself!

After doing some testing, I found that editing a layer within a room suffers from lag once the number of objects on that layer exceeds around 500 or so. I didn’t have this issue on my desktop PC (as I am away from home and working on my laptop now) but this is likely because my desktop had more powerful hardware and, as a result, was capable of maintaining more instances on a layer at once.

Sweet Mountain Act 1 features an ABUNDANCE of rings (in total I believe it’s close to 1000 spread out through the whole level) so to fix this issue I separated these rings into their own layers based on where they are in the level:

This fixed the lag issue and I can now get back to level designing!

Conclusion

Development on Mission 3 of Sweet Mountain is in full swing and I hope to have it completed soon. I’ll keep you guys in the loop about how progress is going; and remember, don’t fall apart, speak with your heart!

-Randomocity Gaming (NOTE: All information presented in these devlogs is subject to change. There is always a chance the final version of the game will differ)