I'm also having some performance problems within the editor, but in my case it's unlikely to be related to global variables (I only have four).
As my project has grown I've noticed that it takes longer to launch the game within the editor, FSM editing has become slower, and the in-editor game FPS has also dropped significantly (the built version of the game still runs very smoothly). Where the performance problem has become most painful is when editing FSMs: connecting events to states, naming FSMs, renaming variables have all started to slow to a crawl (take more than a second to react to input). Renaming a global event takes more than a minute on my powerful Windows PC (and surprisingly only around thirty seconds on my less powerful MacBook Pro).
In fact, the overall editor performance is significantly worse on my Windows machine than on my MacBook Pro, even though my Windows PC has more powerful hardware. Though I should be clear that the performance is still uncomfortably slow on the MacBook Pro.
One potential issue that I've noticed is that old events that I've renamed are still remembered by playMaker. I changed my event naming scheme a while ago and mass re-named all of my events (around 100) from lower-case to upper-case (and starting using event categories with the "CATEGORY / EVENT" pattern). However, when I try to select a global event for a transition, the old lower-case events also appear in the list, even though they don't appear in the Global Events window.
I've turned off real-time error checking, but it doesn't seem to make a significant difference to editor performance. I haven't played with hiding the various playMaker editor windows, as others in this thread have suggested, I'll give that a go tonight.
The things that might be unusual with my project are: I make heavy use of Prefabs to generate my game (both game-board and game-pieces), and I don't use global variables - instead passing variables between FSMs using Send Event. I also favor FSMs with many small, well named, States that only have a few Actions each - rather than fewer States with more Actions in each.
Each of my game-tile Prefabs has four FSMs (and three more on it's child Trigger), but the full game-board has sixty-six game-tiles. Each of my game-pieces has around twenty FSMs (and perhaps ten more on their various child Triggers), and I have six game-pieces on the game-board. Perhaps playMaker is not designed to cope with that many FSMs running at the same time?
I have scaled down to a "development" game-board with just nineteen game-tiles (still with six game-pieces), but it didn't drastically improve editor performance.
Any ideas how I can increase performance? Do I need to rethink my FSM and State-heavy design approach?
