How's the performance hit of BGS playing? how many of them are possible?
Viewing post in Focused Sound Effects PRO for RPG Maker MV and MZ comments
As currently written, this plugin only allows one BGS to play at a time. (Soundtrack Layering is the more interesting plugin for this question, as it does allow multiple BGMs to play at once.) I haven't clocked performance, but have yet to notice any visual slowdown.
I have considered tweaking the plugin to allow multiple BGS-es, though.
Okay, using the F2 command, I see no FPS drops at all when loading four SE/BGSes at once in a loop, nor for four BGM layers in Soundtrack Layering, but four isn't exactly very many, is it? I suppose a real stress test of both plugins is in order at some point.
I made a quick edit to allow multiple focused BGSes at once. (It is NOT ready for release, just a test to see how it would work.) I have sixteen focused BGSes running at once (all triggered by a single event, but in different locations), which do still work as expected with regards to volume and pan, and not a single trace of FPS slowdown.
I could add more, but really, if you have a need to run sixteen BGSes simultaneously, you might want to step back and ask yourself why.
Now, granted, I was running my gaming PC. Might want to be more cautious with mobile-targeted games.
EDIT: I raised that number to about 200 without a problem. I raised it to over 1000, and... well, okay, now it had about half the framerate as usual (I turned the volume on the events and my speakers WAY down before trying any of this!!) Again, you should never ever ever need that many.
I can't imagine that SEs are likely to cause more memory slowdown on their own. The events themselves are more likely to cause slowdown.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I absolutely do see the use case for "more than a couple BGS running", I just hadn't yet set up the plugin for it (still haven't written one that's gone public - I need to work out a way to STOP a BGS from running, since the built-in RPG Maker controls don't expect more than one at a time. Might use an "alias for each one" solution like the Soundtrack plugins use.)
But 16 is overkill, to say nothing of 200. Performance-wise, it worked when I tested it, but... don't.
Sorry about that. Life and everything. But I had some time this evening, so I implemented it. I decided to go with the "alias" approach that the Soundtrack Manager uses. So far, I've only updated it for MZ (since that's the system I was originally testing with; normally I would do MV first) but the MV update shouldn't take too long.
EDIT: MV version updated too.