Archive for October, 2016

Performance Tuning: Splitting Things Up

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Sometimes, there is no way to speed up the thing you’re trying to do. Take Last Dream’s battle transition, which shatters the screen into ~220 pieces that go flying off in random directions, courtesy of the KGC_SpecialTransition script (ytomy.sakura.ne.jp).

perfomance-splitting-things-up
You get an achievement if you play the entire ...

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Performance Tuning: Speedup

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Gamers use the term “lag” to mean a handful of different things. Sometimes, your game engine just runs choppily. In Last Dream, we noticed that the beginning of each turn in battle would freeze for about a second –but only for certain enemies! The last boss of Last Dream 1 had this problem, and it really interfered with the thrill of the fight.

After lots of tracing, we found this line hiding away in the battle engine:

temp_actor = Marshal.load(Marshal.dump(@actor))

Marshal.dump() ...

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A New World Rises…

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Our development team wistfully recalls the approach of Christmas with an exciting new RPG in hand. Ah, the endless hours available to explore a vast new world of possibility! We have been tirelessly striving to complete Last Dream: World Unknown for the holidays, but, in the end, we decided that achieving a high polish was more important to us than finishing early. Hence, our team is continuing to game test and fine tune the in-game experience, adding Easter eggs and ...

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Performance Tuning: Introduction

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Lag, lag lag. Everyone hates lag. We’ve stopped playing games because they were too laggy, and we’re sure you have to. Last Dream: World Unknown pushes the RPG Maker game engine to its very limits, so lag is something we are constantly encountering and trying to eliminate.

But if everyone hates it, why don’t game developers just get rid of it? Turns out that making your game run smoothly is easier said than done. The “Performance Tuning” series will cover ...

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