Laggy pivot

[TθPS]

Hi there, i don't know if this is the right place to post this.

anyway, when i'm animating in pivot with big stks or alot of segments or sprites, the pivot became laggy. I saw in the task manager, pivot only use 45 mb / 3% of ram of my laptop lol , is there's anyway to change the amount of ram in pivot? plz tell me

[Michi]

use less sprites, they make the file heavy as fuck

[TθPS]

use less sprites, they make the file heavy as fuck

i use sprites because using the stks would make it more laggy, and easier to animate.

[Raymond]

If you only have 1.5GB of ram, then that's likely your problem. Your operating system probably uses more than half of that (unless it's Windows XP), plus all the other programs running in the background. If you upgraded to 4GB of ram, you would be in better shape. You're probably using DDR2 ram if it's an older computer, which would also make things slower.

Click start, then click run, then type in: dxdiag

Press enter and you might get a message on your screen, just click ok. It tells you how much ram you have here. Does it say 1.5GB or 2GB? I'm thinking you have 2GB overall, but 1.5GB is available (since your operating system is using some of it) and pivot is using 3% of whats available. But 2GB is still not much these days.

[SIFTER]

If you upgraded to 4GB of ram, you would be in better shape.

My experience says otherwise. Even with 4GB I still encountered some intolerable lag in a failed project of mine(due to the aforementioned issue). I'm thinking that if I download another 4GB of RAM, then I should be in a better shape. Then again, I reckon Mitch had a core i3 build with 8GB of ram and he still encountered lag. In conclusion, Pivot simply won't appreciate a load of sprites and transparency stuffed into it. You'll have to get around it somehow. Whatever frames that require some extra juicing will need to be exported as separate frames, edited in a foreigner software (like pdn or Flash), then imported to Pivot as BG files using ctrl+b. That's the most efficient way I could find so far. Obviously, you should only do this if you know that no further interaction is going to be needed in those very frames.

[Raymond]

If you upgraded to 4GB of ram, you would be in better shape.

My experience says otherwise. Even with 4GB I still encountered some intolerable lag in a failed project of mine(due to the aforementioned issue). I'm thinking that if I download another 4GB of RAM, then I should be in a better shape. Then again, I reckon Mitch had a core i3 build with 8GB of ram and he still encountered lag. In conclusion, Pivot simply won't appreciate a load of sprites and transparency stuffed into it. You'll have to get around it somehow. Whatever frames that require some extra juicing will need to be exported as separate frames, edited in a foreigner software (like pdn or Flash), then imported to Pivot as BG files using ctrl+b. That's the most efficient way I could find so far. Obviously, you should only do this if you know that no further interaction is going to be needed in those very frames.

Even on my build (i5-3570K 3.4Ghz, GTX 660TI, and 16GB of ram), it still takes 60 seconds to open my dojodemon pivot file. But it seems like that's the only problem it has. Once the file is open it doesn't lag, even though it has 70 different background images and is loaded with sprites. But if you're running 2GB of ram, you're not going to have a good time. Especially if you don't know how to disable background applications, because you're not left with much to use. I wouldn't doubt most of his programs stop responding a lot.

[SIFTER]

What component matters the most when it comes to this sort of software? Ram? CPU? GPU?

[Raymond]

What component matters the most when it comes to this sort of software? Ram? CPU? GPU?

Mainly your processor (CPU), but ram helps to a certain point. You don't need more than 4GB, but having 8GB wouldn't hurt if you want to listen to music, play a game, watch a live stream, or have multiple programs open in the background. GPU doesn't really matter, but it helps to have a dedicated video card rather than using an integrated card. Especially if you have multiple monitors or plan to edit videos in 2K or 4K resolution.

[TθPS]

i got 4GB lol
i guess pivot can only take 45 mb of ram, if anyone could fix this, that would be very helpfull

Spoiler:

[Raymond]

I looked up your computer specs. Here's what I'm looking at: http://www.cnet.com/products/toshiba-satellite-c55-b5299-15-6-celeron-n2830-2-gb-ram-500-gb-hdd-us/specs/

It says it comes with 2GB of DDR3 ram, but I'm guessing you upgraded to 4GB, which is enough. You don't have the best processor, but that shouldn't be the problem because my old laptop had an Intel Dual Core 2.15Ghz processor, and pivot seemed to work fine on it.

I think it might be your hard drive. Hard drives are basically like a record player. The speed at which your disc rotates determines how fast the information is transferred. So the more rpms, the faster your computer will read/write information. The average speeds are 5400, 7200, 10000, and 15000 (overkill). You have a 5400rpm hard drive, so you can probably tell it's pretty slow.

Solid State Hard Drives (SSDs) are becoming more popular now, which don't use a disc, but rather a chip that doesn't move. These hard drives are much faster than a standard hard drive because the disc doesn't need to speed up to operating specs before reading/writing data. There's a number of benefits they offer. They will decrease the start time of your computer from minutes to seconds, launch apps/saved files faster, improve load times in games, and have faster overall performance. And since there are no moving parts in a SSD, it will likely last longer. The only down side is that they are a lot more expensive. A 500GB SSD can cost you $150-$200. Where as a standard 500GB 7200rpm hard drive would cost you $40-$50.

It might not even be your hard drive though. Pivot is probably just running slow because of how many sprites you're using. You have a decent laptop that shouldn't really have a problem running Pivot. Maybe you could try disabling your automatic updates. They might be slowing down your computer if they're installing in the background.

Open your Control Panel --> Windows Updates (classic view) --> Change Settings (on the left) ---> Switch it from "automatically download and install updates" to "notify me, but let me choose whether to download and install updates". Then restart your computer.

You can also go to the start up tab on your Task Manager and make sure unwanted programs are not checked. You don't want too many programs running. Maybe that will help.