Hi. I’m making a large, complex mystery game in Inform 7 for Windows (6M62), which I hope to eventually release on the web via Quixe.
In my most recent release-for-testing build, I ran into a noticeable performance bottleneck. Every time a new command prompt was printed, there was a noticeable processing delay – 1 second on my browser, and “freezing” my friend’s browser (which was running on a gaming laptop with very respectable specs). Some trial and error eventually narrowed the culprit down to the “update chronological records rule,” which was taking an extremely long time to run on Quixe – far longer than Glulxe or Inform 7 built-in interpreter.
Now, I don’t know what the “update chronological records rule” actually does. I’ve tried looking at the Standard Rules, but all it tells me is that it corresponds to something in the Inform 6 guts of the IDE. My best guess is that it deals with creating a history of the game world for the purpose of “past and perfect tenses,” as described in Writing for Inform §9.13. My game has 786 objects and counting, so I can see how systematically checking every single variable and property in the game world for changes might be a problem.
Obviously, I can’t ship my game with a performance bottleneck on this scale. My question is, is there any way to make my game run at a reasonable pace in Quixe? If not, will it break anything if I unlist the rule from the turn sequence rules and rewrite my code to compensate for the loss of past-and-perfect-tense functionality?