Topic
About the watering and tending upgrade cards and lag/speed issues
I wasn't sure whether to put this in bugs or ideas. It's not that I don't like the tending and watering speed-up cards. I have them. But the main source of lag I seem to have is waiting for the image of the hoe or watering can to load above each plot. That seems to take 2-3 seconds. Perhaps we could consider turning off those animations? Or implement the previously-mentioned low-memory mode for Glitch and have them shut off in that mode?
I play on a netbook with only 2 gigs of RAM 99% of the time. I know that is my own fault but not all of us can afford top-of-the-line computers, and when I bought this one a little over a year ago, they didn't even MAKE netbooks that would accept more than 2 gigs of RAM (or if they did, I sure couldn't find one. I can now find one model of eeePC that will take 4 GB RAM, but it's $450 I don't have.) As it is, I took the 1 gig stick out of this one and replaced it with 2, and had to break into the BIOS to alter settings just to do that. It's an Asus eeePC with an Intel Atom 1.60GHz and Windows 7 starter. Once Flash starts using up more than about 500MB of RAM, I have to reload the Glitch tab, and I have seen it go up to 1.2GB of RAM during Zilloween in Cebarkul. (Firefox is typically using between 100-200MB of RAM during play.) So I reload a lot, typically every half hour or so. Even more if I'm trying to do home streets or, heaven forbid, go into someone's house.
I plan to TRY to video my gameplay this weekend as requested by one of the devs, if my computer will run the recording app and Glitch at the same time, and I hope that will highlight the gardening slowness. I know already that I really can't watch a Youtube video and play Glitch at the same time, so I'm skeptical.
Replies
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Netbooks are terrible. They should never have created them. They have the "horsepower" of a mediocre-end 12-year-old computer, just much smaller and using less battery. That's why they mostly came with Windows XP up until MS placed XP on the End of Sale list some years ago.
The first and foremost solution I would try, is to go buy a 4GB usb flash drive or something. It's like $10~$16 depending on where you look. Plug it in and tell it to use it as more memory to boost system performance. It's a feature called ReadyBoost.
You see, Windows 7 uses a lot of RAM by itself, but it was designed around the general computer having 4gb+ of RAM. The netbooks are the exception to that. Starter doesn't give you Aero or even the ability to change your wallpaper, but those services only take about ~100MB RAM on average so it's not a big savings. The rest of Windows 7's necessary services and explorer itself take up quite a bit, however, easily up to 1gb in normal circumstances. There goes most of your RAM already. Then you got memory hogging flash, running Glitch, on top of that, and the browser's overhead too. Next thing you know, you're running everything on virtual memory, which is insanely slow.
Even if you could get XP on it, it would be lousy due to XP's own memory inefficiency and 'winrot' it suffers from over time; that and you'd be even more vulnerable to security issues. Plus, you wouldn't have Windows 7's power management features and you may not have a driver available for some fancy function they may have put on that particular model (some win7 era laptops cannot even install XP now without major hassles). Nevermind the fact that XP doesn't like being installed from a USB stick, like Windows Vista/7 can be. And Netbooks don't have a CD/DVD drive. Either way, XP would be a terrible choice in this day and age too.
A lot of people, instead, put Ubuntu or some other Linux distro on their netbooks. Linux continues to get updates where needed, it has proper security, and it runs lightweight (Ubuntu running Unity or Gnome-Shell only uses about 400-500mb RAM tops!) If all you're doing is browsing, youtubeing, and playing glitch... it may very well be the perfect OS for your netbook. You can even shave more memory off by getting Xubuntu or Lubuntu instead, but you'll suffer an uglier and less-featured UI in the process (such as not being able to use winkey+search functions like in windows 7 to start programs). If ReadyBoost doesn't work for you, maybe you could give this option a try!