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Problem Analyzed

I am sure that some of you are wondering why I would consider this such a big deal! There are two big reasons why I consider this to be a critical problem. First, of all, this increases the time it takes for the game to run. Those of you with broadband are probably thinking ,"Well, true, but I can wait thirty seconds." Those of you with 56K modems, on the other hand, are thinking, "well, five megabytes is probably going to take half an hour to load."

From my perspective, there is an even bigger concern. Bandwidth costs money.

If you were to take a look at the files that make up the game, you would discover that there is far less that five megabytes worth of data. In fact, there is only a few hundred kilobytes worth of data. This leads to the question why would a couple hundred k worth of images require 5mb! Obviously, the only way this can happen is if a file is being repeatedly loaded.

It was time to review my code. The first thing to check is my new configuration file handling code. As this was new code it is obviously a potential area for problems. I checked the code to make sure the configuration file was not repeatedly loading. This was probably not the problem anyway as the configuration file is too small so it would have to be loaded thousands of times to cause the problem.

Next I go over all the code that loads graphics or sound files into the game. The goal here is to make sure all of the assets are only loaded once. Everything here is fine, but I do notice something. One routine uses the PixelGrabber class to grab 64 images from a file. The file in question is not preloaded before the PixelGrabber class is called. Perhaps that was the problem.

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