I'm making a small RPG and I need feeback regarding performance

https://jslegenddev.substack.com/p/im-making-a-small-rpg-and-i-need

by ibobev • 9 months ago

91 74 9 months ago

jslegenddev.substack.com

Just downloaded and tried it on my M1 Mac and the performance was what I'd expect for a game like this, both in and out of battle. Totally smooth and ~15% of CPU usage in both cases. By the way, I love the pixel art, and the gameplay has potential, it's a style I've never personally played before but I could see it being compelling.

JSLegendDev3• 9 months ago

Thanks for the feedback! Very much appreciated!

BugsJustFindMe• 9 months ago

is it just my machine? I’m using a Macbook Air M3 with 16GB of RAM

Using one of the singularly most powerful personal computers ever made. It's probably not the machine if they don't notice everything else being unexpectedly bad too.

Lord-Jobo• 9 months ago

Well. That’s a bit misleading.

A real example: MacBook Pro m4 will have absolutely god awful performance on certain web based games * (compared to windows or even android), regardless of the browser or any browser performance settings. This is not the hardware explicitly, obviously it’s a very high performance chipset, but it’s definitely the hardware in terms of what the OP is asking. Because that particular hardware is falling down all over the place in this scenario when others are not.

Fixing it? Sure that’s almost certainly on the games side, some kind of inefficient process or element that doesn’t work right in that environment and needs to be hammered out or replaced.

But for diagnosis? Yeah, “it’s the hardware” is the right answer. And you can’t fix it without diagnosis.

*replicated on latest chrome, Firefox, safari, and Brave, with the games: Idlescape and (now dead)osrsIdle ~8 months ago

jesse__5• 9 months ago

Well. That’s a bit misleading.

Uhh .. wut?

The game appears to be similar to a point-and-click adventure game, which were popular in the 80s, and ran just fine.

In 1988, a CRAY Y-MP supercomputer had "64 megawords of memory". I have no idea how large a word was on those machines, but by todays standards, that means 128MB. Let's go with that. The Y-MP was the size of two massive fridges.

Now, the Macbook air OP owns, which is smaller than a toaster, has 128 TIMES as much memory in it as a supercomputer did back in 1988. Similar story for processing power, storage, etc. Point and click adventure games haven't changed all that much, and even back then didn't require a supercomputer to run.

But for diagnosis? Yeah, “it’s the hardware” is the right answer.

Given the above, how you came up with this is beyond me.

aleph_minus_one2• 9 months ago

> is it just my machine? I’m using a Macbook Air M3 with 16GB of RAM
Using one of the singularly most powerful personal computers ever made.

Some arbitrary PC Master Racer: "Hold my beer, and I will show you a powerful personal computer." :-)

mvkel• 9 months ago

performance issues

What kind? It would be helpful to know what you're experiencing, attempts you've made to fix, etc.

Or is this a thinly veiled "I've been working on this for a while and it's taking longer than I thought and want some encouragement." Which is fine! It's a great thing to ask for.

duttish• 9 months ago

Do you have a profiler at hand?

If you have a friend who is encountering the performance problems enable profiling report export and ask them to send that over to you. Hopefully that'll show you what is taking so many cycles.

b1tshift• 9 months ago

On an M2 Mac with 24GB the game went smooth for a few fights and then went down to around 10fps and got slower with every attack an enemy did in the fight. The longer I played the slower it got. CPU and memory usage was stable all the time.

doyougnu• 9 months ago

Not a game dev. Besides profiling, I would create game scenarios that exercise certain parts of the game engine.

For example, I would create a game fight scenario where the player has infinite health and the enemy just attacks super fast at some settable rate. That way you could monitor whats happening in extreme abnormal conditions with the hypothesis that if the game works in extreme conditions then it will work in normal conditions.

Another example. If you have random encounters like in old school JRPGs then I would create a scenario where a fight happens per step of the player, the fight loads, then the enemy immediately dies, rinse wash and repeat. That should allow you to asses how the game performs after 100s of fights quickly.

The idea here is to create tests that improve your signal to noise ratio. So you create a scenario that will create a large signal so that then you can more easily diagnose the performance issues.

whizzter• 9 months ago

Sounds like the culprit though, could be tons of small objects added for effects or something that still don't show up in memory usage but adds iteration time?

svnt• 9 months ago

This is the future of troubleshooting: where did the LLM decide to introduce recursion based on calculation that draws on an otherwise unused global counter and a separate timer initiated at launch for absolutely no reason.

godshatter• 9 months ago

It can't be hardware, as others have noted these kinds of games have been working great on machines that are magnitudes slower than the OPs machine. Maybe it's some kind of search that is running linearly on an assumed small dataset and it gets bigger than imagined, instead of it running a binary search or something. Maybe some of the data is unreasonably large for what it contains and can't get cached as easily.

And, as others have mentioned, if you really want to know, profile.

golem142• 9 months ago

Isn’t the glaringly obvious problem Garbage Collection?

I’d try digging into this first. Try to completely disable VC and see if there are any slowdowns before you run out of memory. Go from there.

golem142• 9 months ago

Hah, keep disabling VC, but also disable GC.

magicmicah85• 9 months ago

Without downloading the exe (work laptop right now, can try later), have you followed the optimization suggestions in KAPLAY's guides?

https://kaplayjs.com/docs/guides/optimization/

Assuming it's capable of running in your browser, I'd suggest using chrome's dev profiling tools to help with finding the optimization areas. Based on feedback from everyone else, sounds like something is not cleaning up as the game keeps running.

beepbooptheory• 9 months ago

Yes and it is extremely straightforward to find the right thing to look at profiling it: what does your `requestAnimationFrame` look like?

sionisrecur• 9 months ago

I'd suggest getting a SteamDeck and use it as the lower limit on performance. If it runs there, it will run everywhere else.

Narishma• 9 months ago

Even a Steam Deck is overkill for a game like this. This is NES-levels of graphics.

WhyOhWhyQ• 9 months ago

No this doesn't look like NES graphics at all. This is more like the SNES era.

sarchertech• 9 months ago

The NES isn’t spinning up objects for every bullet on the screen or a million other ways a novice developer can blow up a GC.

diath• 9 months ago

GPU code performance != CPU code performance. You can have a visually trivial game (Dwarf Fortress pre-makeover) that will grind your CPU to a halt because of all the simulations it has to process. You can also have a visually complex game that will run fine because the rendering will be properly optimized to reduce drawcalls etc but as the number of units grows, it will push your CPU to the limit.

gwbas1c2• 9 months ago

Why are you worried about performance for a 2D game that's basically moving a few sprites around the screen? A game like this shouldn't be taxing for modern hardware; and should even run cleanly on pretty much any computer made in the last 15-20 years. (Or even older, if you weren't using Javascript.)

As some of the other comments imply that there are some performance issues; more than using a profiler, I would make sure that your mental model of the event loop from your framework is correct. If all you're doing is moving some sprites around the screen, you need points where your code pauses because it has nothing to do. This could either be awaiting something from the framework, or putting most of your logic in callbacks that are triggered by the framework.

A different way to say it: Between frames, there's not that much calculation that your game needs to do when you're just moving a few sprites around in 2D. The event model that you hook into should be something where your game does its calculations, and then waits between frames.

lloeki• 9 months ago

Why are you worried about performance for a 2D game that's basically moving a few sprites around the screen? A game like this shouldn't be taxing for modern hardware
As some of the other comments imply that there are some performance issues

Because there's nothing implied and they experience perf issues first hand? TFA:

I’ve been experiencing performance issues
I’m using a Macbook Air M3 with 16GB of RAM

asveikau• 9 months ago

The fact that they experienced issues on a relatively powerful machine is some kind of commentary on modern software development. The screenshots look like something you could have played on a typical 1998 machine or even older.

jesse__5• 9 months ago

First off, yay for making games! I love working on games, and have spent many, many hours doing it, so welcome to the club :)

Second, let me introduce you to my good friend, the profiler. A profiler is an absolutely indispensable tool for making games. Find one that you like, and learn to wield it with laser-guided precision.

Generally, there are two things you want a good profiler to tell you about; execution speed, and memory. Finding a profiler that tells you about execution speed is pretty easy (basically all of them at least nominally do that), and finding one that also profiles memory (in a useful way) is somewhat harder. I'm not sure of the state of profilers for Javascript, but maybe the tool you're using (KAPLAY) has one built-in?

From my long-forgotten days of programming javascript, one thing you want to look out for (which is difficult to spot without a profiler), is creating memory leaks. Memory leaks in Javascript can be a double-edged sword; you're both using more memory than you should, and the garbage collector has more pressure on it. Over time, this can bring an application to a crawl as the GC spends more and more time traversing leaked objects.

Good luck friend. It's dangerous to go alone, take this :sword:

rossant2• 9 months ago

I love your comment! That's the way to talk to a junior dev without the unnecessary smug.

lukan3• 9 months ago

A bit offtopic, but if it would have been playable in the browser I would have tested it, but I don't want to download and install a (for me) random exe.

(and I don't see how performance could be an issue unless a major screw up, but like others have said, use a profiler. Sounds like memory leak from what was shared here)

DeathArrow• 9 months ago

If it wasn't for Javascript, that kind of game should have been able to run on a 2Mhz 8086 and 640kb of RAM.

aleph_minus_one2• 9 months ago

PC was ridiculed for its bad graphics capabilities by fans of other home computers. Only over time PC's capabilities for graphics and video games improved piece by piece until after many years PC fans had the last laugh.

stOneskull• 9 months ago

they missed out, i reckon. whereas the commodore and atari users had heaps of fun and then moved over to pc anyway.. they'd have more colorful memories.

o11c• 9 months ago

Even with Javascript, there should only be a 10x performance penalty at worst, and getting to 2x penalty is feasible.

We do need to scale based on screen size though - copying pixels around is expensive.

But a low-end machine from 10 years ago should be mandated for all developers.

pqtyw• 9 months ago

If you can't get a simple game like that perform well even when written in JavaScript on a semi-modern PC you wouldn't be able to do it in any language. It's certainly not the issue.

yomismoaqui• 9 months ago

Forget about performance, specially in a 2d game like this one. Focus on making it fun (really-really fun is possible).

I have played games that didn't performed so well because they were so fun. Games are about fun, anything else (narrative, performance, sound...) is secondary.

debo_• 9 months ago

If frames are dropping, it's likely not fun.

xantronix• 9 months ago

Related to the initial poor performance of Electron on macOS Tahoe?

https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/48311

ceigey• 9 months ago

That was my gut feeling too, or at least something Tahoe related. I reckon they’re using Gemshell based on the game icon, which they’ve also been talking about on their YouTube channel.

On Gemshell’s store page (https://l0om.itch.io/gemshell) it seems they’re in turn using Neutralino JS, which should be using a Webview, like Tauri.

butz• 9 months ago

You can use developer tools in the browser to simulate slower CPU. Use performance profiling to find which functions are taking up the most time. Try switching to battery saving mode, it might throttle your CPU a bit too. If you really want to dive deep in performance improvements, you should purchase lowest end laptop with integrated GPU, if budget allows. And how about providing an embedded web version of your game, because downloading unsigned executables these days should be considered a no-no.

JSLegendDev3• 9 months ago

Hi everyone! I'm the dev behind this work-in-progress game.

This post was intended for my existing audience and I didn't expect for it to be posted on HN.

Anyway, now that it's here, feedback on performance is still very much appreciated!

The reason I'm not making this web playable despite being built using web technologies is that I'm targeting Steam for this game. Therefore, I need to make sure the game works well when installed as an executable on Mac, Windows, Linux.

There was already trust established between me and my audience so that's why it felt appropriate to tell them to download executables.

I understand why HN users not familiar with me, would be wary of downloading random executables from the internet. It's a good instinct to have!

lukan3• 9 months ago

"The reason I'm not making this web playable despite being built using web technologies is that I'm targeting Steam for this game. Therefore, I need to make sure the game works well when installed as an executable on Mac, Windows, Linux."

If it runs on the web, it should run the same as an executable, otherwise your exporter is broken. I would likely debug on the web first (just to get access to chrome dev tools including the profiler and performance meassurement tools). Is there some way to do comfortable debugging/profiling with the way you export via GemShell?

TylerE• 9 months ago

That should is doing a lot of potentially very painful heavy lifting in your statement.

ch2026• 9 months ago

Make a web game. This isn’t a web game.

bob1029• 9 months ago

I think you have to ask yourself what you're trying to get out of this, strategically. I know it's probably a "forbidden" option, but Unity is really good at hitting all the platforms at the same time and giving you the ability to deeply understand why things might be running like shit.

I'm working with a partner on a steam game and it was the most rational choice we could arrive at. Our goal is to make enough revenue from the this project to justify another one. We seek to make a living doing this.

I struggle with the lack of advocacy for effective tools on this platform. If we are being honest about the overall engineering proposition, the trade of moderate, unknown capitalist exploitation risk for platform targeting stability might actually be worth it if the goal is to get the game into the hands of as many players as possible.

Electron/Tauri/whatever is just the start of the battle. You also have to consider different input, storage, etc., systems if you want to hit targets like Steam Deck - which is a huge deal for visibility these days. The web is a nasty abstraction layer once we start talking about things like Xbox controllers.

zyx321• 9 months ago

Intel i5-9350, UHD Graphics 620, Windows 11 v25H2

Completely unplayable. It runs fine at first, and then suddenly drops to below 1FPS for no discernible reason. This happens regardless whether I am on the world map or combat scene. I am running the exe, couldn't find the browser version.

On an unrelated note, I am surprised to see a JS program working without the usual 200MB NW.js runtime (as seen with RPG-MV)

JSLegendDev3• 9 months ago

That's because I'm using GemShell. It's tool that generates executables using, under the hood, Neutralino which is similar to Tauri (uses the OS's webview rather than packaging a Chromium instance).

More info here, if you're interested : https://jslegenddev.substack.com/p/export-web-games-for-desk...

rossant2• 9 months ago

Sounds like something is going really bad. I'd be very curious to know what's happening.

tithos• 9 months ago

You may want to add instructions to the game currently it is unplayable

OhMeadhbh• 9 months ago

can confirm. very slow. here's the output I got on Debian 13 on an older i5, but it doesn't look like it's telling us very much.

   ./Small-RPG 
   libEGL warning: DRI2: failed to authenticate
   VMware: No 3D enabled (0, Success).
   libEGL warning: egl: failed to create dri2 screen
   VMware: No 3D enabled (0, Success).
   libEGL warning: egl: failed to create dri2 screen
   
   ** (WebKitWebProcess:2822): WARNING **: 14:52:20.184: The GStreamer FDK AAC plugin is missing, AAC playback is unlikely to work.

casey2• 9 months ago

Why not consult with industry professionals rather than random people on the internet? Gaming is a huge industry worth billions and have many people who have dedicated themselves to the craft. They not only can diagnosis common problems and future problems, but can help effectively change your processes, ultimately identify and solve these similar problems yourself. All for not that much money, you are in a good position to capture a bunch of value if you are serious.

balamatom• 9 months ago

Not running a random "Linux build" (which is probably not going to find some lib anyway) - in 2025 the baseline should really be an AppImage.

andrewf• 9 months ago

Firefox runs the game well on the Mac, while the Neutralino build (presumably using the WebKit shipped with Safari) experiences some performance issues. Can you replicate the performance issues with Safari? If so you might be able to glean some insights from https://webkit.org/web-inspector/timelines-tab/

When profiling, it can often be useful to compare profiles of "working well" versus "not working well". So you could record a 10 second timeline when things are going smoothly, then a 5 second timeline when perf is bad - things that jump out on the second timeline are worth looking at.

hresvelgr• 9 months ago

It's probably worth reminding everyone here that it's possible to write slow code in "fast" languages and fast code in "slow" languages. The state of software as it stands today is horrendous, but seeing as no one here (author included) seems to know why it's slow it's probably worth reserving judgement.

jseip• 9 months ago

Was really hoping you were making a small rocket propelled grenade

I'm making a small RPG and I need feeback regarding performance

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