Hi, when a game is launched from Steam, even on my end, it takes almost 30 seconds to hit the loading screen with the splash. Anyone else experience this?
Is this due to Electron?
Here is a list of GDevelop games on Steam, I played lot of them, and all start immediately.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1614960/Miko_Adventures_Puffball/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2081970/Swirl_Wtch/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1714080/RedTether/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/842170/Hyperspace_Dogfights/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1576840/Ball_Challenge/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1834570/Mr_Meal/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1966620/Triple_Jump/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1503110/Dont_Be_A_Baby/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1596010/Martin_et_le_bton_magique/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1428800/Nukepath/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2250870/XenoFeud/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2216980/_/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/885510/Smutty_Scrolls/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2368350/Guardians_Survival/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2317880/Bullet_Bunny/
Ah okay. Maybe it’s on my end. Maybe it’s something to do with how I package and upload? Were these games done just by uploading the autoinstaller?
My game, XenoFeud has a manual export from Gdevelop. What does your splash screen look like, is it a video?
Nope, just a still JPEG. I think the issue is the amount of scenes I have (over 50).
I’m gonna try to do some fat trimming and see if this helps.
Ok, where can I find your game on Steam
Just as a note, I’ve previously done testing with games that have over 100 scenes, and roughly 2gb worth of assets. Loading time shouldn’t be impacted by any of those. (Key words being “shouldn’t be”).
You might try a preview and load the console as soon as the loader starts (F12 or CTRL+SHIFT+I to show it). See if there’s any errors or anything.
Weird errors like this seem to pop up. Deleting a lot of scenes leads to the previews being almost instantaneous though. I think the scenes use a lot of timers and / or large images, so maybe that’s it?
api… is for game analytics, not a big deal.
But the image not found may be is a missing images inside the ressources of the game, check the ressource tab from the project manager.
That wouldn’t cause the game to launch slowly would it?
Yesterday I went through and optimized all the images, cut everything down by about 25% size wise, also went through and streamlined the events… when I started out, I made a lot of goofy mistakes.
The game runs fine despite all of this, but I’ll just keep chipping away until I can see it make some drastic improvements. I think it’s mostly related to all the images and scenes or something.
I just realized… is there a way to do this directly from the Steam game? I did CTRL+SHIFT+I once the windows open but get nothing. It works fine in the GD editor.
Before you package your build you need to edit your main.js file by removing the two // in devtools part, like this:
// Open the DevTools.
mainWindow.webContents.openDevTools()
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Thanks.
I get these repeated errors during the debug, where it’s doing this 51 times, once per each level.
Pinpointing exactly where these errors are is impossible, and I’m not even sure if it’s in the levels’ code, or in the linked events.
I’ve exhausted basically everything trying to find out what causes the game to launch slowly, but this may be the only lead left.
You should check the events in your project to see if anywhere you forgot to enter a number value, or somehow typed the expression wrong. For example, if you added a specific animation for a sprite, check if you actually specified the correct number of the animation.
That is true.
It can also be inside an extension.
Anyways these kind of errors are not really errors, the engine escape the wrong value by another one, if the field require a number 0 is used, and for a string, an empty string is used “”.
It shouldn’t slow the game at launch. But it’s still good to fill the input with the right value 
For information, texture bigger than 2048 that are not for a tilemap, are often badly supported and take longer time to be loaded in memory specially if you have a lot of them.
And futhermore, people often miss to reduce the video or sound files.
The engine doesn’t reduce the files size (not yet, maybe a day I hope).
Thank you Mirquiso.
Also @Bouh, I have a couple .wav files that are just huge. I wonder if this is an issue. Like, 64MB for one .wav file. I guess I’ll switch it to mp3 and see what happens.
As for texture images, I reduced them, the biggest are a couple of background images at around 1920X1080.
Thanks to both of you, very helpful and thoughtful.
I recommend you to use ogg for your audio. It has a better compression/quality balance and also doesn’t leave tiny silence gaps, like mp3’s do.
And images, you can always use TinyPNG to get a really good reduced png size.
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Thanks, Yeah, using OGG definitely shrunk the size considerably.
No luck on speeding up launch time though.
I think maybe it’s just due to the number of levels and how files are loaded in?
But you are saying that it only happens on Steam? It should show the same behavior with any export.
If you want you can send over the project through WeTransfer to have a look.