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Windows Game performance and project saving issues

W

Wintermute()

Guest
I've been working on a game for about 6-8 months now, so the amount of compiles etc has been huge, but little did I realise the sheer amount of files a GMS game can build up on your PC if you don't keep on top of maintaining your directories.

I've been getting some weird laggy performance issues lately with my game that were never there before, even after rolling back to versions I knew worked fine. Also, I have been getting GMS stop responding when trying to save a project sometimes. This weird performance told me something was up with my platform rather than my game code.

I use the 'clear cache' button semi-regulalry, though obviously not often enough! Using a free (auslogics) defragger I found my system drive was 20% fragmented. After defragging my whole drive I checked the windows user/game maker directory for both the versioning of projects and my gms cache. There were almost 2 million files in the cache and GMS projects directory produced since around july 2016! Seems GMS caches every single file in your game for every version of a project, regardless of whether the file has changed or not. I know there is a technical reason why caches are done on a project level rather than an asset level but boy, this can really cause you headaches if you don't keep on top of it!

Just thought I might post this in case someone else has some weird performance issues that they can find no real reason for, in their code.

Cheers,
W
 
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