Sorry if this has been asked before - I'm sure it must have been, but I scoured the clickteam site and did try a search here, but to no avail, so...
I've been using MMF1 for some time, so I naturally decided to look into upgrading to MMF2. From what I've seen, it doesn't appear to be very much of a leap forward, and certainly not worth buying unless there are some major improvements "under-the-hood" so to speak.
Specifically, am I likely to see a significant (any?) improvement in speed over MMF1, in terms of the speed at which my games run.
n/a
DaVince This fool just HAD to have a custom rating
Registered 04/09/2004
Points 7998
21st May, 2007 at 15:39:30 -
Somewhat. The time MMF2 takes to loop between the event list every frame hasn't changed too much, but the support for big objects has improved. The "set framerate" option is pretty useful too and can speed up your game speed in general.
I don't think there's really much difference, I mean nothing compared to MMF vs TGF.
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
MMF2, unless you push it, wont give you any noticeable performance improvements over MMF1, but if you're anything like myself, which I think a good deal of people here are, you'll find that MMF1 bends down on it's knee's more then on rare occasion, when you try to push it past general special effects (especially particle systems).
MMF2 has a highly noticeable increase in performance if you look at it from that angle.
Titan Omega and Sam run so much smoother in MMF2. Just a shame some of the extensions I used haven't been ported over so I'm sorta up shit creek. Transparency/ink effects just seem to run better in MMF2. Object slowdown limit seems to be more or less the same.
You'll find that generally MMF2 runs a little faster and has some useful options. I think one of the main reasons for producing MMF2 was that Clickteam could distribute it themselves and be free of all the legal bindings and pressure that comes with working for a publishing company. As far as I understand, IMSI did a very poor job of marketing the original MMF (http://www.clickisland.com/1998.html)
May just be me, but I think fastloops in MMF2 are quicker. I did an app for listing out the contents of a large file, which involves several nested loops, and it did it with no noticeable slowdown at all. And that was in addition to a ton of effects going on.
From using MMF1.5 I was convinced I'd get a frame flicker, and had even been preparing a small Loading screen to appear just before the loop started. I was extremely shocked when it turned out I didn't need to.
For me MMF 2 is definetely slower. Every game I've ported to MMF2 is running slightly slower. I don't mind since you gain so much in MMF2 that for me the little speed difference is worth it.
MMF2 has improved every one of my ports as far as framerate goes. Where MMF1 would nail 15fps, MMF2 is still pushing the frame cap. I don't know how other people can be having problems, unless of course MMF2 is slightly more hardware accelerated then MMF1, in which case... if you have shitty hardware, MMF2 will run worse then MMF1. I doubt that though.
I know this because on my dads old shitty Cyrix 533mhz pc all TGF games with a screensize of 320x240 would run full speed. But some MMF1.5 games would suffer slowdown when scrolling. (Furry was one example i recall)
It's hard to test now because we gutted that old pc.
But TGF games running in MMF2 appear to run smoother. However that is not a good indication of performance.
MMF2 produces by default, only 55 loops every second. In order to get the speed up, you need to change that up higher. 60fps will easily surpass MMF1 and TGF, as far as speed goes.
As far as performance goes? (How far you can push it, before it starts to slow down.) MMF2 still wins.