My new project crashes on startup...

dunkelgeist

Maybe some people have seen my first game 'The Knife Club' available on the App Store, well now I'm working on a new project, less complex than the first one.

My project is composed of one animated actor that use 30 png images at 960*640 res as it fills the entire screen and I want it to be retina display ready.

The first actor calls another 5 actors, all of them having from 8 to 15 960*640 additional images.

I've got a blank scene and load the first actor on startup.

It works perfectly on my mac but when it comes to viewer or compiled app, it crashes on startup...

I'm at the middle of the development right now and I have to add almost 30 more images to complete it but I'm really scared... I don't have any sound or anything else, just the actors I've said and a blank actor who spawns the first one on startup.

Any idea? I'm pretty disappointed with that and thinking to switch to Corona if I can't make it work with GameSalad...

Please anyone... let me save the work done until now :-(

Hachiko

30 png of 960*640 plus 8 to 15 960*640?
ram on idevices is pretty low, you can't use so many images that big. plus, those are treated like 1024x1024 image, try to keep img width and height a multiple of 2.
About corona, you can't do it with that too, it's a ram problem. You could easily simulate animation by continuosly destroy and respawn object in corona, who doesn't have a problem with that, altough loading such an image without having it in the memory (which you can't, 30 are too much) would cause a lot of stutter between a frame and the other.

dunkelgeist

Well the project size is only 7MB right now, I've performed lots of compression methods on the images and they are 90KB or less even at a 960*640 res.

Can't that help?

dunkelgeist

To add more info I've converted png images to gif and back to png. That reduces size dramatically but I've also tried a Windows software called PNGGauntlet to reduce the resultant png's up to an 80%.

As a result, pretty tiny images and a crash on my iPhone...

Hunnenkoenig

I have an app, which I can't realize even with iPad and iPhone4.

It is a single background with 2 menu bars.

Outside of the screen there are about 30 different buttons, which slide in by clicking different parts of the menu bars.

The sliding in buttons spawn certain images, which you can drag&drop on the screen.

The app is about 3 MB big.
Image usage raises to 20MB even if nothing on the screen.
Game engine takes 40MB

App crashes at 80MB of RAM.

Nobody knows why.

dunkelgeist

That's very sad...

But I'm very obstinate... I will try it again and let you know my results.

Thank you for your comments and any other help or tip will be much appreciated.

Hachiko

Images doesn't add up in ram with...his file size. I don't remember correctly, but it's something like widthxheight, meaning the bigger, the more ram it needs.
It's not a matter of trying, it's just not possible on a mobile device with limited ram. You can find workarounds though, that includes spawning and such.
If you can divide the images in more little one. I mean, during this animation of 30 image, everything is changing? isn't there an image that it's always there, maybe the background? if that's so, maybe you can get the other one to 512x512. things like that

dunkelgeist

That's what I meant, a workaround, I'm doing it right now, a few more minutes and maybe it will work...

dunkelgeist

It seems that resizing the images is not enough.

Changing animations for change image behaviors doesn't work.

So... what can I say... EPIC FAIL

I have a question... If anyone knows Corona... can I control what's loaded on memory with it?