HELP!!! I've got shocking FPS performance!

battleduck

Hi all,
Well after a month of using GS, and frequent scouring of youtube and the forum for help & advice, i've finally purchased my paid iOS dev license today...so as you can imagine today had been somewhat of a day of discovery with provisioning, ad hoc builds, publishing etc and after a few characteristically excellent videos from tshirtbooth, I have this all up and running and have my head round it all.

BUT...
I'm testing my project in the iOS iPad simulator, and have some shockingly bad fps results. I'm struggling to get above 20fps!!!

As i've gone along:
i've optimised all my images, using the lowest possible power of 2 rule & have been optimised to within an inch of their lives in imageOptim
All static actors have moveable turned off
All actors that can have all physics set to 0
Pre-load art is off in almost all actors
Invisible actors have visible unchecked
I have no spawning at all, instead everything is recycled

And yet from the get go, every scene doesn't get above 20fps! The only exception to this are the tutorial scenes which have nothing more than a single background image 1024x768 and one button with a single touch to continue rule...and even this scene doesn't get over 30fps!!!

I've tried as much seating of youtube and the forums (we all no how hopeless searching the forum is!) as i can and now I'm completely at a loss as to where to go from here. Please help!

The upside is that the loading times in-between scenes is really rather quick.
Thanks
Battleduck

bluebyu25

You'll probably need to upload it. There is something you are missing and one of us can take a look

battleduck

do you mean gs arcade?

i am aware that in the level scenes there are some rather rule heavy actors, and at times a lot of them, so i know I'm in for a stretch of going through all my actors and rule an seeing if anything is duplicated that can be deleted and also some streamlined ways of solving certain problems, but this doesn't explain only 30fps in a scene with only a background and a button

battleduck

or do you mean to a file share site?

RacetotheMoon

It seems like you're doing a lot of things to make sure your game performs optimally.

Try making an actual ad hoc build and load that on your device. You might find that it performs better. Personally, I haven't been able to get decent performance out of the viewer since 0.9.88 went up.

If it still doesn't give you proper performance (eg. over 30fps) you may have too many rules being called at once. Or you may be constraining too many attributes.. Or may even have some things in your code working against each other.

Personally this is why I'd like to see the GS crew work towards creating some sort of performance analyzer. It would cutdown on user frustration by a factor of a million.

Best of luck!

scitunes

Have you loaded the viewer app onto your iDevices? I would try that instead of the simulator. I would also try building an adhoc and seeing how it "feels". You wont get the fps viewer readout with an adhoc but you'll know intuitively if the FPS is a problem or not.

battleduck

I don't have an iPad but will be seeing my brother over xmas and will be able to do an ad hoc build then, so will see if that improves things at all.

Also i've been messing around with things and on a level select screen i deleted the main background image 1024x768, which has been imageoptim'd and bit reduced and has a physical file size of less than 0.5mb, and just by removing this got a 10fps increase to 30fps... how can a single full screen image use suck 10fps (it has no rules)!?

Cheers for the suggestions so far
Battleduck

battleduck

I'm trying at the moment with my level select screens to use a screenshot of the initial states a background , meaning i can delete a few actors, and i therefore i have this question:
I have my crates which have a locked image initially, and then changes to an unlocked image as the levels are completed, but i want o use my new screenshot of the scene with all locked crates in place and then just change image when their unlocked...how can i delete the image in an actor without having to replace it with another? Can you change the "visible" attribute in graphics mid-game?

POM

The IOS simulator is not a good indication for checking fps , it lags like hell , i won't be surprised if your game will run at a nice 60 fps on an actual iPad ..
You gonna have to check it though , try get an iPad from a friend for a couple hours and make some tests .

Roy.

battleduck

Right now i'm really confused...Does anyone understand this?!!!!

As i don't have an iPad to test this on, i decided i would change the project platform to iPhone instead, so i could al least make a comparison between the simulator and a real device (i haven't resized anything, and obviously the graphics are way to big for the screen, but i just want to see fps differences)
well...I changed gs to iPhone, and re build the viewer project in Xcode to run an iPhone simulator instead and my FPS has doubled / tripled!!!!
The original poor 20fps is now 40fps in some scenes and 60 in most!!
I just tried it in the viewer on my iphone4 and obviously its unplayable cos all the buttons are off screen, but I'm getting 58-62FPS!!!
What is going on?!

battleduck

Well as you can see from the above post, you may be right Roy. But why such a massive improvement in iPhone simulator over iPad simulator?

POM

@battleduck
Dont freak out , everything is perfectly normal , the iOS simulator is not an indication like i mentioned above , i have games that runs on iPad with 60 fps , but on the simulator they are unplayable .

Since you have an iPhone , i suggest using it as the viewer , do not convert your project to iPhone mode , leave it on iPad mode , but preview it on the iPhone as it is,
last time i checked this option was working , and you can press all the buttons (they will no be off screen)

That said , if you got 58-62 fps on the iPhone , your game (in its current state) will run perfect on the iPad

Cheers
Roy.

battleduck

Further more i just again without changing the gs project to ipheon, and instead just run the iPad app on the viewer on my phone and not only am i getting 60fps consistently, buy the whole game has been perfectly resized automatically... didn't realise you could do this...i thought i had to be set as an iPad project to work on iPad viewer, and set to iPhone to work on viewer on the iPhone.

battleduck

hahaha, everytime i write something the screen updates to show your last post... seems we're on the same wavelength here lol.
cheers roy.