I’ve been wondering, is there a hard-set variable that is limiting the processing speed Inform games can use? I ask because it doesn’t seem to take much to make the game run really slowly.
Unfortunately not. That’s all up to the interpreter.
In general, IF interpreters don’t throttle performance. They’ll run the CPU at 100% for as long as the game is doing work. If the game is slow, it’s because it’s trying to do a lot of work.
In the “Patrolling Attackers” thread, you’re relying on Inform’s route facility (“best route from…”) which is slow for large maps.
If you limit it, it’s gonna run even slower then. So it wouldn’t help at all. Just make it worse.
Thanks guys, that’s a shame, I’ll just have to avoid route finding…
I’m not trying to limit it! I want to set it up as high as it will go! 
Unfortunately, the others say there isn’t one.
By the way guys, to save creating a new thread, does anyone know why this might be triggering when the player doesn’t have the map? I tried setting it to ‘if the player does not carry’ but it still triggers!
[code][MapKnow is a truth state that is false]
To Say MapGuide:
If the player carries the Paper Map:
if MapKnow is false:
Say “You see you are heading along rocky ridge.”;
now MapKnow is true;[/code]
I don’t think the idea was to limit the speed of the game, only if there was a limit, if it were possible to remove it.
You could check, to a degree. On Windows, open the task manager and one of the tabs is a graph of CPU usage for each of your processors / cores: I have four. (On a *nix system I’d use ‘top’ from the shell, pushing ‘1’ to show each processor / core independently.) Run your game and do whatever you do to make it run slow, and see how many processors are working hard on the task. You may find it’s just one. I have no idea how multi-threaded the various interpreters are, but my assumption (and it is just that) is not very.