2 Problems - Need help.

So I finished making my music level. I added some visual flare to make the level not so boring to sit and watch, and it was working wonderfully. However, there are two issues:

1) Only toward the end of the song/level, it lags quite a bit. It ruins the song for myself (maybe not for others) seeing as how I spent countless hours on timing and now it's all messed up because of lag. The weird thing is is that this lag only happens during certain parts. Parts that I can't understand why. Some areas have more moving parts/objects with corners than the parts that lag up, but the "more complex" portions DON'T lag. It baffles me. Any idea as to why it only lags at these spots?

2) Not sure if there's anything I can do about it, but the music stretches from beginning to finish (I was surprised I fit the whole song), so to reach the finish, I have the mine kart's railing raise you up to the scoreboard. The scoreboard doesn't activate however unless you jump. Not really certain if there's anything I can do about that, and I'm sure it's no big deal.

1. Too many lights, possibly?

2. Umm.. no clue. :p

I'm a big help... :/ Ha!

Well it's not the lights because it was doing that before I added them in. :P I was just hoping it would go away once I was finished and was a one time deal. Well it wasn't. ;o;

I doubt there's anything I can do about the not finishing the level anyway. xD Just jump. No big deal. I'm sure people will be like "WHY IT NOT FINISH!" and then jump.

you could add a piston that flicks them up ever so slightly :D

That could work. I'll try that out. I hope it works. EDIT: Didn't work. :/ Oh well. I just put a Magic Mouth that says to jump.

(I also went through and reduced some of the lighting, sadly, it didn't help. :( )

You could always dissolve / demit the minecart as they reach the scorboard.

As for the lag, generally it seems to be things on screen that contribute most to lag, so maybe have a look into what is visible at the lag times and work from there? IDK.

I hadn't thought of that! That's a fantastic idea. I'll try that next time I get on (thank God I didn't release it yet, I'll probably do so tomorrow). Hopefully now I can remove that dumb Magic Mouth telling people to jump. xD

I'll try other stuff to reduce lag too. I really wonder why it happens. :/

Is the not-activating-of-the-scoreboard caused by the fact that you have a thin layer backing to your mine cart? That could be blocking the area of the scoreboard you needs must stand in front of to activate it :p.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Holguin86

Is the not-activating-of-the-scoreboard caused by the fact that you have a thin layer backing to your mine cart? That could be blocking the area of the scoreboard you needs must stand in front of to activate it :p.

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No, it's because there is a layer between sackboy's back and the scoreboard. He must be directly in front of it, so as rtm223 said, just dissolve / destroy the mine cart at the end, or at least the back of it.

Yeah, I think that is the problem. Sadly it didn't work even after dissolving the kart. (You see, I need the back layer of the mine kart for bits of logic.) So I originally had a checkpoint on the inside back layer of the mine kart (reasons being because while showing the level off to friends, they would hop out of the kart and get squished by it...xD), I figured this was getting in the way when the kart finally dissolved. I moved it off the kart and it still wouldn't activate. :/ I'm afraid I'm just unlucky as I've done small tweaking here and there. Hopefully one jump is not big deal.

Thanks for the help anyway everyone. The level was published recently, but is not showing up online. :/ Something I noticed is happening to more than just me recently.

You should demit it all Logic AND Checkpoint;

1. Capture your object and put it in an emitter (0.1 Frequency, Infinite Lifetime, Max Emitted at once ; 1)
2.wire your logic up to the external source it was connected to.
3. Place a Mag Switch on the minecart facing down (radius 180) and on the score board place a Mag Key, wire the Mag switch up to the emitter
4.put the emitter in a hidden place near the top of the level with s long strip of dm for it to emit onto

voilà

Did you ever suss out the lag issue? You might try fusing blocks of material together so you have fewer objects (that's more important than vertices). Also, if you want to get rid of lag, glue EVERYTHING down (either to the floor or to dark matter). If an object is considered free-moving, it takes more thermo and causes more lag. Generally, you'll get less lag if you add a square of dark matter to every object on screen (yes that means MORE objects and vertices) than you will if you leave them free (though obviously, gluing them all to one piece of dm or to the floor will be more efficient).

You may also doulbe check the logic that is running off-screen also. I had a wierd issue recently that I posted about where I was having a lag skip every single time I picked up a score bubble. That made me think it was something to do with the score bubbles, since I had them all glued to keys that were monitored by a switch.

Funny thing was, I traced the actual issue back to a piston (far offscreen) that was connected to an 'on' switch instead of 'directional' so it was emitting one block of gas and triggering a checkpoint activation every 1.5 seconds... that didn't seem to be such a major thing, but until I set that to only get triggered once, it caused lag every time a score bubble popped (not every 1.5 seconds). The cause/effect were not appearent at all...

The solution isn't always very obvious. I don't know how your level is setup, but if you could, you might try to troubleshoot in sections (copy the level and remove everything but the lagging part, does it still lag, etc.) That's what I had to do until I finally deleted the logic that was causeing the issue, which led me to running in create mode while watching that part of the logic system, which is when I saw the piston continue to cycle after it should have stopped.

Just some thoughts. Good luck!