How costly is 'Overlaps or Collides'?

RacetotheMoon

I'm curious what the processor hit is for the 'Overlaps or Collides' Rule type, as I'm imagining these type of rules fire off every frame.

Reason being, if you have a good number these rules firing every frame you're bound to have some frame rate issues. So I'm also wondering how many is too many?

rebump

I think a couple of the biggest items to worry about are object spawning, lots of objects, and lots of constrains. Too many finely granular timers are probably something to avoid if possible too. I would imagine an actor with a massive rule/behavior set is an issue especially if to many of them (or similar) are present. Audio can be an issue at times. Animating large bitmaps...

RacetotheMoon

Great advice guys, thanks.

Is there a general size that's considered too big or too long for a level? ie. is 10000 units too long?

rebump

100,000 as in pixels wide? Well, probably a bit big if it is populated more than sparsely.

You could manage your background images wisely and re-use your actors (instead of re-spawns) so you may be able to pull big levels off but you would be walking a balancing act of complexity and performance.

RacetotheMoon

ohh no. 320 X (tall) 10,000 Y. =D

I just put my project on the device today and was a little amazed at how much the frame rate differed from what was on my mac. I had some debug stuff up on screen, so I deleted that. I noticed the frame rate got a little better, so I deleted the rest of the HUD data, just to see.. and it's at least close to what looks like a solid 30 fps. This is still a bit away from what I'm comfortably willing to release as a finished product to the App store.

Is there a frame counter of any kind in GS? I'd like to find some way I can at least guarantee 30 frames a second on a 3G device.

firemaplegames

when you preview in GS Viewer, there are FPS stats right to the left of the preview window on your mac.