GMLive.gml

Livecoding for GameMaker: Studio / GameMaker Studio 2 · By YellowAfterlife

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Massive FPS drop after I modify anything in my code live

A topic by gerecsgo created Jul 14, 2022 Views: 244 Replies: 3

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gerecsgo1 year ago (2 edits)

Hi, I just purchased GMlive and I'm using it with a pretty big project. I created a simple object to test it, and I realized that after I alt+tab out of my game and modify anything in my code (the Draw GUI event in this case), the FPS drops significantly. ( From 350 - 400 FPS to 70FPS). The FPS stays decreased until I recompile my game, but if I put the whole content of the Draw GUI event in a comment live, it climbs back to the normal value.

I thought that the if(live_call()) return live_result; calls are affecting the performance but then I realized that the FPS drops only after I modify the Draw GUI event at least once and I save it live. Is this normal?

EDIT: I made some testing, it looks like it only happens with the Draw GUI event.

YellowAfterlifeDeveloper1 year ago

Strictly speaking, this doesn’t make any sense - GMLive has no drawing logic whatsoever beyond an example in obj_gmlive (which isn’t in Draw GUI either). If you can send me a small sample project that reproduces this, I can send it to YoYo Games and try to explain the issue to them.

gerecsgo1 year ago (3 edits)

Thank you for your fast response.

So I realized that this must be a weird memory leak issue that I still don't understand. You can see it in the video, that after I modify a variable that is not even referenced, the FPS decreases significantly. When I put the repeat loops in comment, the FPS goes back to the normal value, but I don't understand why, since the loops did not decrease the FPS until I modified something.

Check out this short clip:

And this is the code: https://pastebin.com/cH623DuXAs you can see, in the debugger there is a spike in memory usage and that is when the FPS starts to drop. Before that, the memory usage stays at a constant level. Does the GMS VM have a memory limit or something? Do I need to increase the memory limit somehow? How does putting the repeat loop inside a comment fix this problem?

I tested it with the old inventory's Draw GUI event too,( which is way more complicated with more loops) and the results were the same.

YellowAfterlifeDeveloper1 year ago

You can try with a new version - since GMLive has to compile and run changed code itself, it’ll always be slower than original GML code, but it should be faster now.

I also recommend getting rid of copy-pasted expressions for item count outline in favor of local variables.

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GMLive.gml

Massive FPS drop after I modify anything in my code live