Vsync in Satazius

[Elaphe]

I really love this game but there's a problem with performance: the ships movement is not totally smooth, and you can see some hiccups very often. I wonder: is there any way to force vsync in this game, which should fix this problem? I've tried with the options in the Nvidia control panel with no success. A similar problem happens with Hydorah. I wrote the author of this game some time ago and he told me there's no way you can control this with Gamemaker, so absolute smoothness is not posible.

[Moniker]

Hmm I don't get this issue. You mentioned messing with the nVidia panel -- in my ATI integrated gfx thing there's an option to force V-Sync onto all applications. Maybe take a look and see if you can manage that. My craptop often has stutter problems on other games like Super Meat Boy but never Hydorah or Satazius, which is why I'm a little surprised. I do get something like that when my bittorrent client or something leaked resources, but a reboot clears that up.

[Elaphe]

If you move the ship horizonally from one side of the screen to the other, the movement is not absolutelly smooth all the time. I mean there should be no interruptions, even if we are talking about half a millisecond, at any moment. It's like playing R-type in MAME at 60hz, although the problem with R-type is worse because the frequency missmatch is huge.

[louisg]

There aren't many ways to guarantee smooth performance in a 2d computer game given the wide range of hw configs. Are you sure it's tearing? It could be as simple as that the game uses a timer independent from your screen refresh rate. This may cause objects to move smoothly for a few seconds and then jerkily for a few seconds, depending on how the two rates differ.

You could try playing with refresh rates and see if that helps (maybe set it to an insanely high rate so that the variances are minimized).