Scratch

Shift+click "Extras" and set single-stepping to Turbo, it'll make projects run several times as fast as normal but not online.

Oh! That'll help a whole lot for making projects that need to process lists quickly! Maybe now I'll retry conways game of life!

The speed actually went down in this version; projects that used to run at full-speed in Presentation mode (i.e. Requiem of Thunder Demo 2) now run at half-speed. Turbo Mode just makes it choppy.

At this point, now that we have lists, all I really want from future releases of Scratch is optimization and speed, and maybe I/O.

S65 wrote:

The speed actually went down in this version; projects that used to run at full-speed in Presentation mode (i.e. Requiem of Thunder Demo 2) now run at half-speed. Turbo Mode just makes it choppy.

At this point, now that we have lists, all I really want from future releases of Scratch is optimization and speed, and maybe I/O.

I have been noticing some performance issues as well.  Here are my subjective findings - I would be curious to see how they compare to other people's experiences:

1.  Projects run noticably slower in version 1.3 than they did in 1.2.1. 

2.  Development in the  Scratch application seems to be slower too - particularly when in the Paint Editor working with the Text tool.

3.  Strangely enough, many projects now seem to run slower in Production mode than they do in Developement mode.  Even if you aren't running in Turbo mode.

4.  Projects run noticably slower on the Java player online than they did prior to the 1.3 release.  Some projects that were at the ragged edge of acceptable performance have become unplayable.

I'm hoping that maybe these performance problems may be the result of the rush to accomodate the 1.3 features and maybe when the Scratch Team has a chance to relax a bit, they can profile the applications and maybe gain back the lost performance.  Any comments from the Scratch Team? 

How about the rest of you folks out there...do you agree with my four findings above?  Or is it just me?

My Guardian 3D game which pushed the old version of scratch to its limits is now unplayable online.  I just wrote a new game called Kablock and optimized it to run at an acceptable speed, but when I uploaded it, it plays way too slow.  I have decided not to make any more projects until the performance improves.  I might use my time off to learn Flash.

I have noticed that projects using list watchers run slower in presentation mode than in edit mode. If I hide the list monitors, though, presentation mode works okay again. I can't confirm other things being slower now than they used to be, except when I switch to a language with a non-Western character set (which I do only very rarely anyway). The java player, of course, is something different. I'm confident that it will eventually catch up with Scratch again.

Paddle2See wrote:

Projects run noticably slower on the Java player online than they did prior to the 1.3 release.  Some projects that were at the ragged edge of acceptable performance have become unplayable.

I'm hoping that maybe these performance problems may be the result of the rush to accomodate the 1.3 features and maybe when the Scratch Team has a chance to relax a bit, they can profile the applications and maybe gain back the lost performance.  Any comments from the Scratch Team? 

How about the rest of you folks out there...do you agree with my four findings above?  Or is it just me?

I have the same finding... One of my games was reasonably fast on v27 Java player but now it unplayable with maybe 2-3fps :-((( I'd like to know: did you somehow changed the execution model (changing process scheduling, yields on repeat/forever, etc.) or is it only matter of v30 needing some optimization and will work smoothly again in v31?

Hi, deerel.

I've been working to fix various issues in the Java player related to the new features. (I'm afraid we rushed the release a little to get Scratch itself out in time for the start of the school year, and the Java player was not really ready). v31, which was released on Thursday, is supposed to fix most of the problems. I'm glad that it seems to have addressed your performance problem.

  -- John

johnadmin wrote:

Hi, Paddle2Sea.

Thanks for sharing your observations. One factor that may make Scratch 1.3 slower than 1.2.1 is that some of the text is being rendering with a general Unicode text engine, even when you are using a language such as English that did not previously need Unicode rendering. That's because you might be editing a project created by someone who used Unicode in their project (e.g. in the "say" block, or the names of sprites, costumes, or sounds). The Paint Editor text tool is one example of this.

The Java Player did have some performance issues. I hope those have now been resolved.

Of course, we'll try to improve performance as much as possible in the next release, but we may be limited by the speed of the underlying Unicode engine.

  -- John

Hi Johnadmin,

Your latest release of the Java Player is much improved!  Performance appears to be pretty much back to previous levels.  Thank you very much! 

Do you have an explanation why performance in Production mode is slower than performance in Development mode (at least when list watchers are being shown)?

There is still something weird going on in the Java player with certain characters being capitalized when they should not be.  Specifically, lowercase "a", "b" and "g" end up being upper case.  Also, other letters only show up in lower case, even when they are entered as upper case.  See these projects for example:

http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/chalkmarrow/276212

http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Paddle2SeeFixIt/257886