When I play C:DDA in SDL mode, it is awfully slow when lots of tiles are shown on the screen.
The speed apparently goes down the more tiles are shown on the screen. When there are a few, it is a bit faster.
It doesn’t seem to matter much wheather I use fullscreen.
On a size of 210×65 using the RetroDays tileset (10px×10px), the game reacts so slow it is not fun anymore. It is almost not playable anymore.
On default size, the game is a bit faster.
I hope this is really just a performance issue with C:DDA itself, and NOT with my machine. 2D games are no problem for my machine. Normally.
A while back there were some pretty severe performance issues for a few builds, but no one has mentioned experiencing them recently. Im not sure if this was the case with the stable version or not but i definitely played a build around the time that 0.A came out that was very slow, where time between actions was 1-3 seconds instead of being instant. This might have been related to animations which now seem to be broken/turned off.
Have you tried recent experimental builds to see if the problem persists? I’ve not noticed it in recent builds, but ive also not spent a lot of time playing with each new one lately either.
Out of curiosity what are your CPU/GPU specifications, are you running the game with software rendering enabled/disabled? If you turn off tiles but keep using the tiles version does the game still run slow? Does the slowdown depend on the number of tiles on screen specifically, or could it be whats in those tiles thats causing the slowdown? Too many animals, zombies, items perhaps?
Not a dev here and just making guesses to try and figure out what the issue is. Try out the software rendering option under the graphics tab and see if that makes a difference. Also try running windowed instead of fullscreen? Will have to grab a new build later and do some testing, been super busy lately and unable to sit down and spend much time testing.
Sadly, this issue has still not been adressed yet, so SDL mode is still a no-go area for me unless I use a tiny resolution.
Oh, and to answer the question: Yes, it seems to mainly depend on the number of rendered tiles. It is faster when there are less tiles to be rendered.
My wild guess is that all this is caused by some old rotten code which slows everything down. Either that or I just missed another compiler switch. Other 2D-tile-based games are no issue at all for my computer. Also it does not matter for performance if I use fullscreen or not.
Also I do not suspect the game logic to be the slow part here, because console mode has no performance issues at all for me.
For the record: The last time I’ve checked, I used a self-compiled C:DDA, as of 9b31058aa6b0ec46455811c21ee94a75de21b2dc on GNU/Linux, compiled with “make RELEASE=1 TILES=1”. Remember that I used a small tileset (10pixel×10pixel).
