DatesOfGelerium
Member
Alright, so here's the deal. I've been working on a game in my spare time for the past year or so and building it up over a very long time, and I think I've gotten to the point where it has too many sprites to run on my computer.
I'd made it up to programming the final levels when suddenly it threw me "Unexpected error occurred when running the game" anytime I tried to load it. After looking into it for a while and playing with some sprite assets, I came to the conclusion that I've been using too many sprites and it was shorting out the memory. There are admittedly a TON of sprites, the final boss in particular has three different parts all of which are heavily animated and have very large sprites, like 500x500 pixels on rough average and over two hundred of these subimages total for each part. The game runs fine if I take all of the final boss stuff out right now, but even without that giant chunk, it still uses enough sprites that just adding a few more will cause the same problem. Maybe I was overambitious on this one? I don't know. But it's kind of preventing me from progressing more with programming the game and becoming a problem.
Maybe keeping the sprites external would help? This could theoretically help according to some posts I've read, though I tried doing some of this according to some old tutorials I found on YouTube and just ended up at the same dead end I hit before with the same "Unexpected error" message showing up, just this time happening after the loading bar finishes filling up. I'm guessing the root cause of the issue is the same as before.
The computer I work on isn't particularly up-to-date, I use an Acer laptop running Windows 8.1, with 8 gigs of RAM on it and a terabyte hard drive (that's nearing full since I do a lot of video work, but I've had no problems with old games I made that take up significantly more hard drive space than the one I'm working on). Perhaps I may be due for a RAM upgrade or a different hardware upgrade or even a whole new laptop or something like that? (well maybe a whole new laptop is a bit much but you get what I mean) While I do prefer the idea of running the game on lower-level machines like mine, this could be a sacrifice I'd be willing to take, this game is more of a personal passion project than something I'd planned on rolling out with a big release or the kind of thing that would get a lot of attention so limiting it to people who have more RAM wouldn't bug me if that happens to be the problem. (Starting to get the feeling I should be upgrading my RAM soon anyway.)
As an aside, I also admittedly have been programming this game on Game Maker 8.0 Pro. Yes, don't laugh, I'm aware that it's *extremely* outdated, I've just been wary about upgrading because I'm so used to the workflow of that version, and to be honest I don't really think upgrading to the latest version of Game Maker Studio is going to actually help my problem. 8.0 has been working perfectly fine for me up until this problem popped up, and all signs I've read around have pointed towards this being more of a problem on the side of Windows. But I could be wrong, if upgrading the version of Game Maker I use will help, of course let me know in that regard.
If possible I do still want to carry out what I initially had in mind for the game with the overabundance of sprites and all without curtailing the stuff I already had or completely starting over from scratch, but it is entirely possible I've been going about something wrong this whole time that I never thought about. I get the feeling some giant overhaul will be needed at this point, just need advice on the best way to move forward from here.
I'd made it up to programming the final levels when suddenly it threw me "Unexpected error occurred when running the game" anytime I tried to load it. After looking into it for a while and playing with some sprite assets, I came to the conclusion that I've been using too many sprites and it was shorting out the memory. There are admittedly a TON of sprites, the final boss in particular has three different parts all of which are heavily animated and have very large sprites, like 500x500 pixels on rough average and over two hundred of these subimages total for each part. The game runs fine if I take all of the final boss stuff out right now, but even without that giant chunk, it still uses enough sprites that just adding a few more will cause the same problem. Maybe I was overambitious on this one? I don't know. But it's kind of preventing me from progressing more with programming the game and becoming a problem.
Maybe keeping the sprites external would help? This could theoretically help according to some posts I've read, though I tried doing some of this according to some old tutorials I found on YouTube and just ended up at the same dead end I hit before with the same "Unexpected error" message showing up, just this time happening after the loading bar finishes filling up. I'm guessing the root cause of the issue is the same as before.
The computer I work on isn't particularly up-to-date, I use an Acer laptop running Windows 8.1, with 8 gigs of RAM on it and a terabyte hard drive (that's nearing full since I do a lot of video work, but I've had no problems with old games I made that take up significantly more hard drive space than the one I'm working on). Perhaps I may be due for a RAM upgrade or a different hardware upgrade or even a whole new laptop or something like that? (well maybe a whole new laptop is a bit much but you get what I mean) While I do prefer the idea of running the game on lower-level machines like mine, this could be a sacrifice I'd be willing to take, this game is more of a personal passion project than something I'd planned on rolling out with a big release or the kind of thing that would get a lot of attention so limiting it to people who have more RAM wouldn't bug me if that happens to be the problem. (Starting to get the feeling I should be upgrading my RAM soon anyway.)
As an aside, I also admittedly have been programming this game on Game Maker 8.0 Pro. Yes, don't laugh, I'm aware that it's *extremely* outdated, I've just been wary about upgrading because I'm so used to the workflow of that version, and to be honest I don't really think upgrading to the latest version of Game Maker Studio is going to actually help my problem. 8.0 has been working perfectly fine for me up until this problem popped up, and all signs I've read around have pointed towards this being more of a problem on the side of Windows. But I could be wrong, if upgrading the version of Game Maker I use will help, of course let me know in that regard.
If possible I do still want to carry out what I initially had in mind for the game with the overabundance of sprites and all without curtailing the stuff I already had or completely starting over from scratch, but it is entirely possible I've been going about something wrong this whole time that I never thought about. I get the feeling some giant overhaul will be needed at this point, just need advice on the best way to move forward from here.