One of the things that bugs me about Card Hunter is that it is slow, and it frequently hangs (ie. the program stops responding). The slowness and crashing both happen in the character setup screens. It takes a few seconds to get into those screens (after every battle, or when opening a new adventure). It takes around 7 seconds to 'restore' an archived party. And after playing a few single-player modules, the game will often hang when entering one of those screens. These are problems that have been around for a long time. I've talked about them on these forums before. But a lot of time has past since then, so I thought I might raise the issue again. Are these problems that other players experience as well? Are they problem that the developers are interested in trying to fix? Are there any work-arounds? Possible contributing factors at my end are that I'm using the Steam version; and that I have quite a large collection. (I've sold almost nothing since I started playing; so I've got lots and lots of duplicate common items and treasures.)
Probably because you have a large collection. I use Steam too but my collection certainly isn't as extensive as yours. Loading times are very fast for me, and my laptop is pretty old, so yeah.
It's a problem that's been around for a long time on the steam client in my experience and not down to the size of your collection. I'm pretty sure it was discussed a long time ago...perhaps not long after the steam release. The program becomes slower and slower the longer you're logged in and will eventually become unresponsive after a few hours. Seems it's SP rather than MP related - if I leave the game idling on the map it seems to get worse, so is probably down to a memory leak in Flash. If I remember correctly, looking at Task Manager in Windows, you'll find that one of the Flash instances is constantly increasing in size and will eventually bite the dust.
In my experience Steam runs faster than using a browser. This definitely sounds like your irrational hoarding is the cause. Like others have said, get rid of all the excess equipment! You only need 3 x the available class slots of all the different items (e.g. six of all the different staves, nine of all the different divine items, three of all the different boots, etc...) Just saw this and it definitely sounds more plausible. although what kind of times are we talking here? The longest playsessions for me has been during the birthday celebrations, when I've played several hours straight, but haven't experienced any slowing downs. Surely people quit the game, once they stop playing it for the day? Or at least when they turn their computers off. People do turn off their computers after the day, right?
I haven't had any of these problems and have a huge collection of items. I have had experience with being a TCG developer however and we ran into these problems quite often with some players. It might help to post your computer's specification, I suspect a lack of RAM might be an issue. There will always be a bit of visual lag when the game loads up. The memory fills up with all the data for the items and cards after the loading of the game, if there's not enough memory strange things can happen, such as crashes, hangs as the memory is juggling the assets about. You might even see bugs that are undocumented. Flash is an incredible resource hog, it doesn't use most hardware acceleration features that you may see in non-flash games, so always assume that complex flash games might require more resources than games developed on other architecture, particularly the memory. You can alleviate some of the symptoms by clearing your browser's cache before loading up the game and closing non essential programs this will free more space for what Card Hunter needs to do. The only other thing I can think of and will be the most effective is to upgrade your RAM. Just for reference, the game I used to work on would eat through 1GB of RAM after about an hour's play. So that's around 2-3GB of RAM that you need to have, after you take into consideration the OS needs, I haven't checked Card Hunter.
I use the web client (through Firefox) and usually have Thunderbird and Libre Office open at the same time. It takes about 10 seconds to load my inventory each time I go to the deck builder, but I've never had a problem with crashes. I don't have a video card, but I don't play for long periods of time (and my computer is turned off when I go to bed). It would be really nice to cache your inventory locally (at least do it for players who have their passwords saved) so we're not wasting that bandwidth all the time. And I'm pretty sure the server already checks if the client is trying to cheat.
There is definitely a memory leak, at least in the Steam version. Here's a post I made about it last year, which has some similar information to this thread. My computer itself isn't running out of memory though. It's an old computer, but it has 6 GB of RAM. And everything on the computer runs smoothly even while Card Hunter is slowing down and freezing. Selling my collection might reduce the problem; but here's the thing: I don't want to. I like being able to see how many Pain Hats and Kobold Killers I've found. It's somewhat satisfying to know that I've got close to 100 sides of bacon. It's nice to see the collection grow, and it can be interesting to see which items are most common. Maybe I'd sell the items if I knew for sure that it would make the game fast and stable; but I'd rather not have to, and I'm not going to do that just to test. (At this stage, it would take a significant amount of pretty tedious playtime to just sell the stuff anyway.)
Would be nice if they just added a x2 or whatever to the items instead of displaying each separately. Would clean things up nicely too.
