what's everyone getting for their fps in games?

Sparkyidr

It worries me that even when I don't have a lot going on, my fps drops to like 40.

for example..

I have just started an app, I have 20 "buttons" onscreen (80x80)... and when they are touched, they change their alpha value, and play a .ogg file.
and thats it.

When I preview in the viewer, the mac is telling me it's running at 40-42 fps.
Seems like a pretty big fps hit for doing not too much??

on my 3gs I should say.

(bah.. i've posted this in the wrong forum...again.....I suck!)

quantumsheep

The 3GS can handle a lot more than older models, obviously, so it really depends on what you're doing and how you're doing it.

On my latest game, I can have up to about 20 actors, all moving, and get a still steady 30fps at worse.

On a first gen ipod, it goes down to 3fps - which is why I abandoned trying to cater to that model for this game.

There are a few things you can do to make sure that stuff works smoother.

1. Make your graphics power of 2. Not the actor, they can be any size, but the actual images you use.
2. Destroy actors that go off screen (i.e. if actor self position y < 0 then destroy actor etc)
3. Check actors that are not moving (e.g. score, lives - any HUD stuff essentially) and make sure the 'moveable' box is clicked off. This is found in the actor's inspector (where it has the actor's colour, size etc).
4. Try not to spawn too many actors at once. One solution is to have actors already in the scene but out of sight. Then when needed they can be moved into view. Not ideal for some games, I know.
5. Keep testing your games using the viewer whenever you add something new to try and work out what it is that's slowing your game down. On a couple of my games it was that the rate of fire was too fast (thus spawning too many actors every frame). In one game (Bugzone) I had to remove the horizontal fire and replace it with a solid wall. In my next game, I'm ignoring the issue If you test after implementing and testing a feature thoroughly, you can see where the bottlenecks happen.
6. I've found the GS Viewer actually works better when you test a game through Game Salad (as opposed to the 'recently played' games on the viewer that you can play away from GS - weird as it used to be the other way round!) The best way to see 'real world' performance is to build an app for testing purposes. Laborious I know, but in the immortal words of Ripley, "it's the only way to be sure".

Anyway, hope that helps and good luck!

QS

JamesZeppelin

Thanks, good post.

One question and something i may be missing

WHen you say make sure everything in your hud is checked as "moving" in the actors inspector does that mean they can work (show and not move) but still be bogging things down if now individually checked?

thanks

quantumsheep

Yes - the engine has to check all moving actors every frame I believe.

If you have non-moving actors marked as 'moving' it will check them too - even though it doesn't have to as they don't move!

Which will impact the engine's performance, obviously!

Cheers,

QS

StormyStudio

Had to tinker with my app that I've just submitted. Part of it which was like a sound board, was running fairly poorly on my 3gs. But after trimming my looping sounds as much as possible, tidying up my rules so there were as few as needed and making everything non movable I now get fps of about 60. Only slows down a bit when I go to a more interactive part of the app. Thanks go to tshirtbooth for suggesting the changes I made.