Scratch

Go here - http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=13548

It only takes a long time to save if your project is big. "big" is like 6MB... It was the same in 1.1.

Hi, Beebe.

Sorry you've run into some things that are slow. I will try to suggest a few things that may help.

When you say "save", do you mean saving the project in a local folder or do you mean hitting the "share" button to upload it to the Scratch website? Scratch now does more work to try to keep projects small (thus speeding up upload/download time); for a project with a large number of costumes and/or sounds, this extra work could be slowing things down a little bit. If you will upload (share) the project that is slow and post a link, I can investigate further.

If the project is fast to save locally but slow to share to the website, you can try unchecking the box "compress images and sounds" when you share it. That make make the project larger, but it could save time since it won't compress the images and sounds.

When you import an image into Scratch and navigate to a folder with lots of pictures, Scratch has to build little images (thumbnails) of all the images in that folder. If that folder has many images, this can take some time. Scratch then saves the thumbnails in a file called "scratchthumbs.db". So the next time you go to that folder, Scratch will only need to make thumbnails for any new images that have been added to the folder. But there may be a catch: if the folder is read-only, then Scratch cannot save the "scratchthumbs.db" in that folder for the next time, so it will need to compute the thumbnails *every* time you visit that folder.

But now that you know how it works, you can do several things if you don't want to wait. First, you can put the images you want to import in a folder that's writable. Then Scratch can save the thumbnails so it doesn't have to compute them every time. You can also put your images in a folder that doesn't have many images in it. Then it will be faster for Scratch to create the thumbnails. Finally, you can add images to Scratch just by dragging them from the folder and dropping them on the Scratch window. This avoids having to create thumbnails at all. The image that you drop will be added as a new costume to the currently selected sprite. Or, if the stage is select, it will be added as a new background.

I hope these suggestions will speed things up for you.

  -- John

MasterCheif: try giving write permissions to the directory where you are trying to save. Otherwise you can try saving on a different directory.

The scratchthumbs.db file is not essential, but it speeds up the showing of costumes by quite a bit.  It is much more efficient to have one thumbnail file in each directory, rather than a single huge one, since the file needs to be updated every time that the set of images changes.  Having to verify that all the thumbnails are up to date would take much longer if you had to check all directories, instead of just the one you were looking at.  (Yes, there are ways to do it all with a single database, but you can run into all sorts of user access and permission problems, which are simpler to handle by using the filesystem and having one thumbnail database per image directory.)