dotsonj23 said: As to FPS issues. I am guessing that some of that is when people are not preloading the majority of their images. Then when the games starts the images start to load (or load later at a specified point/time as allowed). I can see that this could cause an immediate drop in FPS when this is happening because now the device is not only performing the rules that are currently happening but also loading up massive amounts of data (i.e., images). Thus, I think this new feature has to be used very carefully and you will need to harmonize between load times and the potential sudden loss of FPS in game. Clearly, everything a player would see when an initial scene loads up should be preloaded (unless you are going to use a fade in effect). As to other images, I think those should be loaded up periodically in game rather than all at once and only when they are needed. But even doing that may cause FPS issues if they are needed at a time when the device is already working hard on performing a complicated set of rules at the same time. Thus, what I think you should really shoot for is to load things that are not preloaded during portions of the games when not much is going on, if possible. But if your game has complicated rules going on all the time, I think your only choice is to sacrifice some scene load time and preload many of the items from the start. Thus, I think in the end it will come down to trial and error to get an even balance between the two (load time and FPS) in complicated games. And each and every game (at least complicated ones) will be different in that respect.
The fact is that at some point the images need to be loaded (either preloaded=longer load times, or loaded on the fly which possibly=FPS/performance drop). GS can't do anything about that (unless the way things are being loaded now is just straight up inefficient, which I wouldn't guess would be the issue). What I think all of this does for us, is gives us the tools to chose our options that best fit our particular game. In the end, I think GS deserves kudos for that.
As to the sound and otherwise issues (let's get those fixed, please). Also, can't believe they have not fixed the IPAD custom splash issue. I pay for Pro and should be able to use it and that is the best feature of Pro. There is no excuse for that. But in the end. I love GS, so just my words of encouragement.
Not in my case, all art was preloaded and in the scene where I had stable 60 fps, now I ha e 38-60 fps and some little freezes (swops\lags). I also tried to optimize project by checking off preloaded flag on some actors, that didn't change anything.
Regarding audio, I did notice an issue when I opened up one of my projects. Whenever I tried to preview it would crash with this current version. Happily by using the handy-dandy recent off switches, I determined quickly it was my old OGG files causing it. Removing them fixed it. I've not had a chance to test it with new OGG audios as I'm working on a different project in GS right now so it could just be that it needs to be replaced..... However I'm also using a 6 year old Duel Core iMac which may also be in conflict with the current Gamesalad builds? Everything else seems to be behaving so far. Gamesalad is definitely getting stronger overall. It's such a joy to not have those memory leaks where we would have to restart every 5 or 10 minutes ) Mike
imGua said: Not in my case, all art was preloaded and in the scene where I had stable 60 fps, now I ha e 38-60 fps and some little freezes (swops\lags). I also tried to optimize project by checking off preloaded flag on some actors, that didn't change anything.
I have exactly the same problem. There is like nothing in my scene except a few particles and images. Everything ran perfect with 60 fps until yesterday. Now it drops to 40-50fps... I have no clue how this happens, i checked every actor in the scene and all scene attributes like gravity.
I tested a few things in order to find out where my performance issues come from and it seems like particles are causing the frame rate drops. Did i miss any change with this update or what's going on with the particle system? Even a third of the particles i used before the patch are causing frame rate drops now.
My game has 50+ levels and lots of actors per scene. To test the asset release issue I traversed the 50+ levels going from scene to scene and my game freezes up on my iphone when it get to around level 40+. I tried traversing the first 30 and then traversing backwards towards level 1. The game freezes up after going back 10+ levels. When I did this on the previous version of GameSalad I did not notice any hangs. Has anyone else noticed this with their games? May I suggest that GameSalad provide a method like "TryToUnloadAssets" this just tells GameSalad to unload unused assets when it has a chance. I think the game developer knows best when in their game is a good time to unload unused assets.
For me, crashes. My productivity is at zero right now.
this was happening for me too. but i solved it. i found out that it was being caused by one actor. inside the actor for some reason it now (since updating) doesn't like the .ogg file used by the play sound behaviour. first i just deleted that actor and the preview worked fine but after i figured out that its something to do with the .ogg file being used i just changed the file and it works. try going through your actors and delete them one by one and previewing them after deleting them until the game doesn't crash. if you have alot of actors try deleting them in batches then testing. dont save while attempting this.
I had to go back to 0.9.71... luckily I did have the foresight to backup first. Everything seemed fine, and I did see a bit of speed/smoothness upgrade in animations...
Would like to thank cobGames for the following tip:
“So when the game over screen pops up I have an actor that plays the sound that used to play when my actor collided in the game scene. When my actor collides causing game over I have it pause scene and go to my game over screen. if you play bubble dodger lite in the game salad arcade you can see what happens when you collide with bubbles.”
It was killing me that I could not submit my game because of the sound bug. I can confirm the sound bug appears when you move scene to scene either by changing the scene or resetting the game. So, my game has less the 10 scenes and by moving things around and using the pause as Cobgames described I was able to kill the bug.
As a result, the bug is now gone and my game has no loading time between dying and restarting since its now on the same screen.
Took about 4 hours to do it, but that’s better than waiting for an update or a patch.
COBGames said: yeah i had posted about that one azimpact. it seems that sounds do not play completely anymore and they are tied to the scene, so if the scene ends, pauses or resets the sound stops or doesn't play.
Yep the 'run to completion' is ignored on all playing sounds on scene change - it just gets chopped. Please fix.
Noticing frame rates of animated looping actors are a little slower and laggy too. Was getting really good and smooth animated results from 0.9.71 - now i'm getting stutters occasionally with this build - even after the gfx have been loaded.
Can a global feature be added to turn off/on preload art for ALL actors. It would be much quicker to turn everything off and then just select the 8-10 actors that i want to preload.
Better still, why not just add them to a predefined Tag group?
The checkbox thing is a little monotonous if you have a few 100.
Major problems with performance, but only with the iPad version of my game. serious lag and glitches. I ran the iPad version after deleting half the frames of all my animations and set up all my preloads and still major lag, ran my iPhone version without changing a thing and it's perfect.
Kinda weird considering that the iPad should have way more memory than the iPhone 3GS. been optimizing the crap out of the iPad version all night, still "stuttering" as Toby stated. iPhone version is running better than ever now though.
Hope there's a fix soon as my game is a halloween release.
@toby, the reason preloading is default on is because that's how it was before we got the option, it's normal behavior. You should not be turning preloading off on all your actors I would assume that would cause even more problems(not that I've tried it). It's for use on Images that don't need to be seen when you start the scene, so it makes sense to have preloading on by default.
FYI they've added another info article on how it works
zombieaddict said: this was happening for me too. but i solved it. i found out that it was being caused by one actor. inside the actor for some reason it now (since updating) doesn't like the .ogg file used by the play sound behaviour. first i just deleted that actor and the preview worked fine but after i figured out that its something to do with the .ogg file being used i just changed the file and it works. try going through your actors and delete them one by one and previewing them after deleting them until the game doesn't crash. if you have alot of actors try deleting them in batches then testing. dont save while attempting this.
A thousand thank yous! Now I can keep progressing on my project. Thank you! It worked!
Sorry, didn't post the link but so far that page has frozen 3 different browsers on my iPad (under beta OS), I think it's trying to load something at the discussions end or face book plug.
On 09.8 version, the loading time on the screen is improving but one thing i cant understand...
Why the Ram on the Game Engine keep on increase by a lot! Previously on my game, the ram usage on my Game Engine is around 30 mb when i finish my whole game(25 lvl in all).. But now, when i reach 7th lvl the Game Engine ram is on 70mb++(17-20 on 1st lvl then increase by 8-10mb in every next lvl) and that crash my game anyone know why?
before this version i used 0.96 and it run smoothly but now, i run out of idea already... anyway to release the Ram that been cram up in the Game engine?
p.s. the Sound and Other is dont hv this problem... p.p.s. the Image is really take less ram now!
Edit: i notice that the Game Engine Ram keep on increase by just switch between 2 scene(like Status scene to Shop scene and repeat that) which is not happen in the previous build..
I will say that I have noticed that gamesalad is loading a lot faster. Awesome update, what more can I say!
I'm not the expert but I'm speculating the fact that the engine is loading things much faster is the reason why the ram might usage might have increased. I just usually go by the gauge of: If it runs decent on my 2nd gen iPod touch, then thats a good thing.
well, mine is running on a 4th gen touch and it still crash... which when in the older build run fine and now feel kinda sad... Lately the build that been release hv more bug then usual..
Yes, there is a benefit as any actors that use the NULL image will be sharing the same texture in memory, therefore it only has to load once even if over 100 actors use it. It would be the same as using a basic white box or arbitrary shared image but you mask the loading a bit by keeping the texture fully transparent. If for any reason your game hitched there could possibly be a split second in which the player would see the white box before it loaded in its actual art.
Does that make sense? Basically, the fewer textures you can load at the time a scene loads the faster you will get into your scene. If all of your actors share the same base image then technically you are only loading ONE image at the time the scene loads. And in my experience the most universal/versatile generic image for this purpose is a very small full transparent image.
Yes, there is a benefit as any actors that use the NULL image will be sharing the same texture in memory, therefore it only has to load once even if over 100 actors use it. It would be the same as using a basic white box or arbitrary shared image but you mask the loading a bit by keeping the texture fully transparent. If for any reason your game hitched there could possibly be a split second in which the player would see the white box before it loaded in its actual art.
Does that make sense? Basically, the fewer textures you can load at the time a scene loads the faster you will get into your scene. If all of your actors share the same base image then technically you are only loading ONE image at the time the scene loads. And in my experience the most universal/versatile generic image for this purpose is a very small full transparent image.
Ok cheers that makes sense.
Yeah normally I don't add any base images at all. So at the start of the scene there will be a flash of white boxes. I hide that by having a fade from black transition on all scene changes. But a shared transparent base image makes sense to avoid the white flashes completely.
For the next update it would be great if you could continue the asset management improvements and add a behaviour that lets us release individual images and sounds from the RAM.
Or do you think the 0.98 update will enable the following example?
So on the Canabalt example you could have constantly evolving background images and sounds depending on your progress in the game. The illusion of an 'endless' mode would be much more complete. The recent GS game Spooky Hoofs does that a bit but Thomas would have been limited to how many backgrounds he could use in one scene before the RAM exceeded the device limit.
Hoodloc said: Nope, mine has some massive performance issues too. I'm making a vertical shooter and in my gameplay testing scene there are only some star particles, the player plus max. 10 shots at once and every 3 seconds a spawned enemy. Before, there were absolutely no issues, the game ran smoothly at 60 frames. Now, everything still only uses around 20mb ram in total but the frame rate keeps declining down to 30 fps. This totally messes up my game.
I too like Hoodloc and imGua now have a massive fps drop after this update. Before updating my game ran at a steady 60fps on ipod touch 4, now though it drops to 51fps. Game does run fine via the Preview player nut my only solution for now is to remove some actors to get the fps up again.
Has something changed during the update to be causing this?
Comments
Shadows Peak is an atmospheric psychological horror that explores the dark side of a player.
Happily by using the handy-dandy recent off switches, I determined quickly it was my old OGG files causing it. Removing them fixed it.
I've not had a chance to test it with new OGG audios as I'm working on a different project in GS right now so it could just be that it needs to be replaced.....
However I'm also using a 6 year old Duel Core iMac which may also be in conflict with the current Gamesalad builds?
Everything else seems to be behaving so far. Gamesalad is definitely getting stronger overall. It's such a joy to not have those memory leaks where we would have to restart every 5 or 10 minutes
Mike
I have no clue how this happens, i checked every actor in the scene and all scene attributes like gravity.
I guess not all steps can be steps forward...
May I suggest that GameSalad provide a method like "TryToUnloadAssets" this just tells GameSalad to unload unused assets when it has a chance. I think the game developer knows best when in their game is a good time to unload unused assets.
but... <moving to support board...>
“So when the game over screen pops up I have an actor that plays the sound that used to play when my actor collided in the game scene. When my actor collides causing game over I have it pause scene and go to my game over screen. if you play bubble dodger lite in the game salad arcade you can see what happens when you collide with bubbles.”
It was killing me that I could not submit my game because of the sound bug. I can confirm the sound bug appears when you move scene to scene either by changing the scene or resetting the game. So, my game has less the 10 scenes and by moving things around and using the pause as Cobgames described I was able to kill the bug.
As a result, the bug is now gone and my game has no loading time between dying and restarting since its now on the same screen.
Took about 4 hours to do it, but that’s better than waiting for an update or a patch.
Better still, why not just add them to a predefined Tag group?
The checkbox thing is a little monotonous if you have a few 100.
Kinda weird considering that the iPad should have way more memory than the iPhone 3GS. been optimizing the crap out of the iPad version all night, still "stuttering" as Toby stated. iPhone version is running better than ever now though.
Hope there's a fix soon as my game is a halloween release.
FYI they've added another info article on how it works
Thank you for informing the thread of the additional post created with info on the Preload Art attribute.
If anybody is still confused please visit: http://gamesalad.com/blog/2011/10/07/gamesalad-best-practices-asset-pre-loader-part-ii/
Cheers,
Shaz
Why the Ram on the Game Engine keep on increase by a lot! Previously on my game, the ram usage on my Game Engine is around 30 mb when i finish my whole game(25 lvl in all).. But now, when i reach 7th lvl the Game Engine ram is on 70mb++(17-20 on 1st lvl then increase by 8-10mb in every next lvl) and that crash my game
before this version i used 0.96 and it run smoothly but now, i run out of idea already... anyway to release the Ram that been cram up in the Game engine?
p.s. the Sound and Other is dont hv this problem...
p.p.s. the Image is really take less ram now!
Edit: i notice that the Game Engine Ram keep on increase by just switch between 2 scene(like Status scene to Shop scene and repeat that) which is not happen in the previous build..
I'm not the expert but I'm speculating the fact that the engine is loading things much faster is the reason why the ram might usage might have increased. I just usually go by the gauge of: If it runs decent on my 2nd gen iPod touch, then thats a good thing.
Yes, there is a benefit as any actors that use the NULL image will be sharing the same texture in memory, therefore it only has to load once even if over 100 actors use it. It would be the same as using a basic white box or arbitrary shared image but you mask the loading a bit by keeping the texture fully transparent. If for any reason your game hitched there could possibly be a split second in which the player would see the white box before it loaded in its actual art.
Does that make sense? Basically, the fewer textures you can load at the time a scene loads the faster you will get into your scene. If all of your actors share the same base image then technically you are only loading ONE image at the time the scene loads. And in my experience the most universal/versatile generic image for this purpose is a very small full transparent image.
Yeah normally I don't add any base images at all. So at the start of the scene there will be a flash of white boxes. I hide that by having a fade from black transition on all scene changes. But a shared transparent base image makes sense to avoid the white flashes completely.
For the next update it would be great if you could continue the asset management improvements and add a behaviour that lets us release individual images and sounds from the RAM.
Or do you think the 0.98 update will enable the following example?
So on the Canabalt example you could have constantly evolving background images and sounds depending on your progress in the game. The illusion of an 'endless' mode would be much more complete. The recent GS game Spooky Hoofs does that a bit but Thomas would have been limited to how many backgrounds he could use in one scene before the RAM exceeded the device limit.
Has something changed during the update to be causing this?