slow down

I have finally gotten around to taking pictures of rocks and assorted to put on the Itress level.

I now have a problem. On one particularly complex screen, the game has a longer than normal loading time for that screen.

It has over 35 "objects" on 4 diferent layers. When moving from one screen to the next, it ussually happens in about half a second. When moving on to this screen, it can take as long as 2 seconds. This is diconcerting for the player, and most screens are going to have this level of detail. Is there any way to speed up this?
Would making the original source images smaller help?

I have finally gotten around to taking pictures of rocks and assorted to put on the Itress level.

I now have a problem. On one particularly complex screen, the game has a longer than normal loading time for that screen.

It has over 35 "objects" on 4 diferent layers. When moving from one screen to the next, it ussually happens in about half a second. When moving on to this screen, it can take as long as 2 seconds. This is diconcerting for the player, and most screens are going to have this level of detail. Is there any way to speed up this?
Would making the original source images smaller help?

I don't edit (or play) Saira, but could you combine some of the objects into one big object? Like having a screen-sized CO on KS.

I don't edit (or play) Saira, but could you combine some of the objects into one big object? Like having a screen-sized CO on KS.

Objects in Saira are faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar more complex (ie: the images themsleves doesnt move. but they have lots and lots of code)so i think no.

How big are the original source images? Certainly try to make them as small as possible (not size wise, but filesize wise). Each of the 35 objects aren't using a different picture are they?

You could put multiple rocks in one picture and then rotate it in the level editor so only one rock is visible, but that probably won't reduce the filesize very much.

You may end up having to only use two or three different rocks and repeating them in that screen. Or you could stick a few of them in your tileset. Then they'd be loaded when you get to the planet instead of on that screen.

The problem is that the active picture object I used in Saira to display scenery objects (not sprites though) can not cache images and need to load them on the fly when you enter a screen. It's by this reason the backgrounds in Saira are actually blurry and lo-res as well as the blurred images that's resized to be larger. It's basically a set of images that's not very large, which is what results in an acceptable load time.

The animated picture object is not hardware-acceleration optimized as the active picture is, so despite that it can pre-cache images, I can not use it for anything other than smaller sprites that doesn't rotate. In other words, that isn't an option for the scenery. Of course I wish things could work slightly differently, but I'm doing my best with MMF2's limitations

ill try resizing the images next time i can get on the computer.
I think there like 1000X somerthing, so thats probs the problem

Sorry for the double post, but my computer's hard drive brokes 
Ill be able to test this in about 5 days or so..... 

wait, did I say hard drive?  

It was motherboard
(luckily  )

any way, I re sized all of the pictures to 25% of their original size, and the speed is back to normal!

Now to fix the lack of alpha channel (gee, thanks ms paint  )

Maybe you should merge some custom objects together so they can have the same purpose, and less on the screen!