Animation laggy at first?

Another question, sorry D:
So i have an animation for my character and I notice when i run the game, the animation plays very laggy at first, but once it finishes playing once, after that the animation plays very smoothly.
Will the animation still play so "laggy" at first in the final game?

The reason it's playing like that is because it has to load the animation. Once it has loaded the animation it should remain in the memory cache at least until the scene is changed or reloaded, unless the cache gets overfilled.

You can preload animations too & they will stay in memory until manually unloaded but preloading can also generate lag & is best done at the end or beginning of a scene. There's also a bit of a limit as to how many things you can preload/store to memory based on the players computer vram/ram etc.

The general idea when animating with frames is to try & keep the filesize down of each frame & to limit the amount of frames used. The more frames there are &/or the larger the filesize of each individual frame, the more vram/ram etc that is required to load/play the animation smoothly.

I don't know the exact math but think of it like this: You have multiple animations in the same scene that will be playing/loading at the same time & let's say that each animation has 24 frames & each frame is 300kb each (minus whatever texture compression reduces)... you do the math.

There are certain tricks you can employ for some animations such as splitting larger animations into multiple animations (I call these chunks) in which we play/load a specific portion of an animation first & then have it play/load another animation after the current one has finished playing etc.

Also for certain animations where it doesn't matter if the image is super sharp such as rain, snow, fog, clouds, particles etc, it is possible to create the animation frame images at say 25% of actual size & then use lua to scale them up size you actually wanted them to be. This makes them a little blurry but for something that isn't really a focal point I don't think it matters all that much.

Anyway to sum up your question: it all depends on the computer of the person who is playing your game. graphics card, vram, ram, processor etc vs the data needing to be loaded.

I literally only have one animation of 12 png frames that are 70 x 260, and it's still so laggy at first, wtf D: I have an average-spec laptop from 2009 so it's not the best computer, but...lagging for 12 frames?

http://wiki.visionaire-tracker.net/wiki/System_Requirements

Make sure you read the first additional info block in the minimum requirements section. An average spec laptop from 2009 doesn't mean anything to me, as the specs could be anything.

Also are you running any other processes/apps while using Visionaire Studio, or running your game via the editor?

Wow wtf. I only have 32 MB dedicated video memory. Can't believe I have this little.

32mb you sure?

mid to low range laptops tend to use non-dedicated (shared) graphics cards which take from the computer ram instead of having it's own dedicated memory.

my last laptop had a shared graphics card with a total of 378mb available memory (if I remember correctly). I could play games by Daedalic but there was often quite a bit of lag at the beginning of each scene. My new laptop has a dual graphics card (dedicated & shared) with 768mb dedicated memory & a total of over 2gb with shared memory which runs pretty much any game made with VS without any lag. I even managed to run Bioshock Infinite & Assassin Creed 4 on here without too much difficulty although had to change settings to medium for AS4. This laptop is only a cheap (ish) entry level gaming laptop though which I bought for around £400 ($700 approx) on offer.

Yeah I've played games by Daedalic before (before I ever knew about visionaire actually) and they worked fine on this comp...do Daedalic games definitely have the same system recs as Visionaire then? sigh maybe it's because I had to reinstall the operating system and all the drivers on this comp a while back and maybe i did it wrong? i really don't know what's wrong...

I tested out a much lengthier 900 frame anim on another laptop (unfortunately it's not mine) and it worked beautifully with no lag.

I wish I knew exactly what I had to do to get it to work on this comp...

My graphics card specs are this (maybe i read from the wrong spot for the 32 mb):
chip type: mobile intel 4 series express chipset family
dac type: internal
adapter string: mobile intel gma 4500 mhd
intel video bios
total available gfx memory: 1759 mb
dedicated video memory: 32 mb
system video memory: 96 mb
shared system memory: 1631 mb

the laptop i tested it on out where it worked fine only had twice the dedicated video memory, 64 mb

Also I think I am running it in the editor? I'm just pressing F9. I haven't "built" it or anything.

intel express chips are shared/non-dedicated cards but you've got quite a lot of video memory available so it should work pretty much ok, I think. I'm not really up to date on computer hardware, mind.

Yeah you are running it via the editor, which means it will probably be using up a bit of processing power/ram but shouldn't be significant. Maybe you need to update your bios drivers &/or graphics card drivers etc? I had to upgrade my gpu drivers (I think) on this laptop so that I got more options to calibrate my graphics card properly, as it was laggy as shit when I first tried to run assassin's creed 4 on it & the game ran a lot smoother after I upgraded my graphic card drivers & adjusted a few of the settings.

Yeah i don't know why my comp is making it so laggy...I looked at graphics properties/3D to see if i could change any of the settings and there are really not many settings for me either...I installed the latest "graphics accelerator" that i could find and it made no difference. i also tried updating directx if that would make any difference lol, didn't work.

i tried running a daedalic game and it works fine. i'm sure they have their own settings going on behind the scenes though that make it run better?

i'll try updating my bios drivers. so far nothing has worked, no sure i'm gonna be able to fix it on this computer. it even lagged a little on the other laptop i tried but not noticeably. argh so annoying!

would the lagging probably be nonexistant in a build, then? i can't do a build cause i haven't actually purchased visionaire, just the evaluation version

update: it works fine in visionaire 3.6