Scenes and Loading Times

Photics

I have this theory. I haven't tested it yet. But after watching my game load on the iPod Touch, without the GameSalad viewer, I started wondering about load times. It's too long. To play my game, it loads the title screen... then after the title screen... it loads again.

Theory: It may be possible to shorted loading times by keeping everything in one scene.

True or false?!

If it's true, that's bad. It would limit my game design options. My game seems to be reloading itself every time it switches scenes.

Photics

Does it load when moving between scenes?

Vmlweb

The speed it loads scenes depends on how many actors are in the scene I think

Photics

So... it seems if you could cram everything into one scene, your game would have better loading times. Right?

firemaplegames

Also, it has to decompress the .ogg files before each scene which adds to the loading times. You can use uncompressed .caf file (I believe?) to shorten the loading times.

Yes, if you cram everything into one scene, there wouldn't be loading at all because you're not changing Scenes.

But unless you're making a short, throwaway app, it will be extremely difficult to manage.

Hopefully in the future the loading times will improve.

scitunes

Will using .caf files affect performance after the scene loads? Or is the only downside to .caf the extra size that it adds to the app file?

Photics

I don't know about .caf as my audio was imported as .wav

If you select Music, GameSalad will convert it to ".m4a"
If you select Sound, GameSalad will convert it to ".ogg"

I tried .m4a but my loops didn't work as well as with .ogg

Heh, as for throwaway apps, my app is short but I wouldn't consider it a throwaway app. For 99¢ you could play for hours. But after seeing my game on the iPod Touch, without the GameSalad viewer, I'm seeing a list of things to improve.

1) The controls... the accelerometer is just not good enough.
2) Loading times

Loading for 20 second to get to the title screen, and then 21 seconds to get to the game, is just too long. It almost seems like it's loading my game twice. There are things I can fix... like down-sampling my files. My game has more sound/music files than anything else, which doesn't seem ideal for GameSalad. Sound management seems to be a weak point.

I was thinking of making a game similar to Gauntlet or Zelda, where each scene would represent a section. Seeing the load times with each scene, that seems like a very bad idea.