Extremely slow performance in ActionList Editor with one specific ActionList

speedkills

Hi,

This is the first time I've experienced this but it's making this particular ActionList almost impossible to edit. It's running at roughly 1fps and is causing the main Unity window to run very slowly too. If I try and type anything into a newly created dialogue box, for example, the input lag is painfully slow and it takes about 10 seconds to display a single typed word. Here's a screenshot of the main Unity window and the ActionList editor open at the same time (I have two screens). As you can see, the ActionList isn't even very complex. All that's at the bottom of the editor outside the screenshot are a couple of dialogue: play speech boxes.

As soon as I dock the ActionList editor next to the Inspector performance improves, but only up to about 5-10fps. It's still severely hampered as long as that ActionList is open. It's fine with all other ActionLists. I've got another one with even more actions (25) that runs fine too. 

I'm using Unity 5.5.0f3 Personal 64bit and Adventure Creator 1.56e.

I've got Open Hardware Monitor open and my PC is handling everything fine. CPU and memory usage only go up to 20% max when Unity is open. 

Is there anything obvious that could be causing this?

Thanks

speedkills

It's actually happening with several other long-ish ActionLists now. From what I can tell, the ones that are affected are the ones that involve conversations. I have a long ActionList that has no conversations (just a lot of variable checks/sets and a few menu input sets) which doesn't seem to slow down.

hightreason

I have had this happen before too actually, but I have no idea what it is. When it happened to me, the actionlist in question was very unnecessarily long and complex, and I assumed that was the issue, but I don't really know. I haven't had that issue since. Just with that one actionlist which I have since deleted.

I assume you have tried breaking up the actionlist into smaller ones (calling another actionlist instead of skipping to a new place in the same one) and seeing if that does anything. At the very least it may help you track down the problem if one of the smaller ones is still slow but the others aren't.

ChrisIceBox

Welcome to the community, @speedkills.

The Unity Profiler window may give you additional insight into the root cause of the issue.  If you suspect it's due to the Dialogue: Start conversation Action, there's a simple way to check:

Back up your project, and then uncheck the Override options? boxes.  The connections to your other Actions will be severed, but see if that makes a difference to the speed.  If not, delete that Action type entirely from the asset.

If that is the cause, one solution would be to do away with the option-overriding feature, and instead rely on sepearate ActionList assets for your Conversation's responses, which can be set at the top of your Conversation's Inspector.

That said, it doesn't look like an ActionList that should cause such problems - so I'd like to look into it further.  I cannot reproduce any such problem on my end, however - so please share any insight you get from the tests above, as well as any relevant output from the Profiler.

speedkills

I unchecked the override options box and it made no difference. I actually tried putting together a similarly large ActionList without a conversation and the same problem occurred. It seems that the issue might be just to do with the size of my ActionLists. I made another ActionList last night that was more than twice the size of the original one causing me issues (this one had more than 60 actions in one list) and it slowed down to below 1fps. I tried closing the ActionList editor and just looking at the list in the inspector and I'm having the same slowdown issues there too. As hightreason said above, I might just have to break down my ActionLists into several smaller lists.

Do you not have any slowdown issues at all from very long ActionLists?

ChrisIceBox

Sorry for the trouble - Nothing like that kind of slowdown, no. The ActionList Editor window will slow depending on how many expanded Actions are visible at any one time - though the number in the image you posted should be OK.

Try collapsing your Actions - you can select-all / collapse-all by right-clicking in empty space. Does that improve things? Listing Actions in the Inspector can also have an effect - you can limit their display to the Editor from the top of the Actions Manager.

speedkills

Collapsing the actions fixed it. Just collapsed a large chunk of them and it sped up 10-fold. Thanks!