Splat Ruler lags, can freeze NL/CE for seconds

[Simon]

NL 12.14 on Ubuntu in Wine 10.0
CE 1.0.1 on Arch Linux in Wine 10.6

The splat ruler lags the entire engine as long as it's active.

Repro:

• Play different levels in NeoLemmix for 2 hours. (I believe? Some preparatory step here is necessary because I can't repro it here on a fresh program run. Or do I have to screenrecord NL? I doubt it.)
  
• Play Turrican's level Space Program 10,000 BC v1.01, it's attached. It's large and it contains many special tiles. The file alone is 400 KB.
  
• Scroll around (with right-click scrolling) to get a feel for performance without the splat ruler.
  
• Tap the key for the splat ruler.
  
• Scroll around (with right-click scrolling) to get a feel for performance with the splat ruler.
  

CE froze for several seconds. If I hold (not merely tap) the key for the splat ruler in step 4, CE froze for 10 seconds, then stuttered at 1 frame per second. It was severe in my livestream from 2025-05-28. I'll post an excerpt.

NL/CE return to regular performance (= less lag) after we release the key. And if we play more/different levels afterward, the ruler doesn't dent the performance anymore there, even after it had dented performance on Space Program 10,000 BC.

Backgrounds on/off seems to make no difference. Can't test again now because step 1 is hard to guess/repro. So strange that it doesen't reproduce immediately after a fresh game run. So hard to guess what's going on internally ... it's such lag, and only on Turrican's level. And why do other levels run fine afterward even with the ruler?

on my machine, the ruler is a bit laggy. When I press the key it appears correctly, but it stutters when I try to move it accross the screen. To move it, I better make it disappear, then reappear again elsewhere, not very handy.
Is it just me (running NeoLemmix on Ubuntu + Wine) or all NeoLemmix users ?

-- Simon

[Guigui]

Thank you simon for creating this thread following my off-topic question in the other thread.

To precise my experience with NL on Ubuntu with Wine 10 : splat ruler stutters each time, no matter how long you've been running the game for and which level you are playing.

It just appears where it is supposed to, then follows the mouse with many many frames of delay, or does not follow at all if you move mouse too fast.
This is amplified if the level happens to have many Lemmings on screen and animated object. Things go a bit better if you pause the game prior to display ruler ; but not good enough to make it actually usable like it is supposed to.

Reading simon's experience with it, I'd guess this is all related to running the game via Wine on a Linux OS. It would be nice if some native Windows users could share their experience with the performance of splat ruler.