Hello,
I have mainly some general questions about how to optimize a game for better performance.
My current problem is that our game takes around three times more memory than all the game files (if not more), and continues increasing the memory and cpu usage.
So can you tell me what might be the problem.
First there are three of animated panels (animated sequences in Targa format) and 3 static panels, 3 avatars (humanoids, each MDL file with all animations and included texture is around 15mb - is that ok?), and some really low quality textures for the flat walls. There are not more than 30mb sound files. And all this takes more than 700mb RAM! :/
Do you think the problem is in the script, or the big models, or textures? I have no idea. We succeeded to lower the RAM usage by loosing some textures, but the that's not the way...
What is the main cause of the big memory usage and can you tell me ways to optimize a game?
Sorry for the swarm of questions. I would really appreciate your replies, so thanks in advance!
Regards,
Nikolay

Sounds like a coding issue to me, probably 'while' loops with 'if' statements incrementing on each cycle.

Find and fix them before anything else.

Check num_actions by pressing F11 or add this function to your panel and You'll see number of running actions in one time.

Thanks for the replies. We couldn't find errors in the code, but we do found that the Targa image files and sequences take huge amount of memory. We were using animated menu-s, and all the frames were different pictures (32bit with alpha channel), and these turned to be memory eating components. I guess we need to find another way of animating our menus.

Which leads to another question: Our game has and will have many graphic files (UI with all panels, textures and other small graphics.) Are they supposed to me in the memory all the time from the start of the game? Is There a way to load them only if they are needed and not at the beginning (for example the panels or the optional graphics that appear only if something is done), and to remove them from memory after we use them. We tried the "purge" function, but it doesn't seem to be changing the situation...

maybe use one bmap with frames? like explosion bmap with frames
name_of_bmap+10.jpg and then call which frame should be visible?
or use .dds format
just suggestion