How much destroy/spawns are too many?

DrGlickertDrGlickert Member Posts: 1,135
edited November -1 in Working with GS (Mac)
So I'm REALLY struggling with my game right now. I have a great idea for a game (I believe at least) and it involves lots of spawning and destroying actors. Since GS has severe spawning/destroying memory issues; what is considered "too much destroying/spawning?"

Is this an issue that is being worked on for the final release?

Comments

  • design219design219 Member Posts: 2,273
    My first game has a lot of constant spawn and destroying going on and I found it to be no problem. You can check it out, (it's a free game) and see if this is what you mean. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/food-fight/id352646643?mt=8

    In the "mixed salad" challenge the veggies, weapons, chef and parts flying off are spawned and destroyed repeatedly.

    I have seen many people talk about the memory problems, but I never experienced them when developing this game.
  • SlickZeroSlickZero Houston, TexasMember, Sous Chef Posts: 2,870
    From what I can tell, when a 3g phone gets to 40 or 50 mb of used memory, it will crash. That number is much higher for 3gs and i4. Check in the GS viewer when testing to see where your memory caps out at. If it's under 40 mb, you should be okay on 3g and newer devices. Key word being "should"
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  • DrGlickertDrGlickert Member Posts: 1,135
    Alright. I'll relax a little and give it a shot in the viewer before I go on a huge rant.
  • simo103simo103 Member, PRO Posts: 1,331
    Not that I have much experience .. but like you, I have had my concerns after reading the forums. I have however tested a few setups and surprisingly found (based on someone else's suggest) that large overlapping images can effect memory use quite substantially.

    As an example: I had a scene that had the usual background image and a number of actors in it. However I created a black jagged border for the scene that was one image full scene with most of the middle part transparent. This was my viewer results:

    WAS: FPS 42 Images 19.3megs
    Now: removed borders and replaced with individually sized border images. FPS 58 , images 11.3

    I am stating from memory here but I believe the reason was that overlapping images were using a lot of horsepower for screen redraws.

    Don't know if that knowledge will help you at all but I think the general message would be to try what you want to achieve, test and then if the issue arises you (and the forum) can see what can be done.
  • DrGlickertDrGlickert Member Posts: 1,135
    Thanks TSB - that's very helpful. I have a regular 3G iPhone so I'll test it on that. Hopefully it doesn't add up to quickly and I can get some real game action going.

    Simo103 - I'm not entirely following what you're saying there...

    I'll give it a shot and see what I come up with. I'll press on with how I want it to run and see what happens.
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