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I tried a remake of pacman. You are right, the lag is terrible. But really all you have to do is set up all the variables for the DoTs, and then the instance of getting hit.
All in all I got 15 frames rather then 30 (1/2 of avg frames)
That is what I did. Each dot was a very basic event that had a graphic, through, variable +1 and erase event. It was the parralel processes that slowed it all down.