performance

devospice

I'm developing a game with my son and so far I love working in GameSalad. But I'm concerned about the performance. We're doing a side-scrolling platform game and in the beginning the frame rate was solid but at some point I did something that killed it. Now I'm getting about 6 fps at the most.

I read another thread about optimizing GameSalad's performance. Some of those things I'm already doing. Some I need to go back and do. I saw one guy who said all of his games run at 60fps and it has to do more with the quality of his coding and logic. That's encouraging, because it tells me I can go back and tweak the game to get the frame rate back up to playable levels, but it's a little vague. Does anyone have any advice for dos and don't as far as coding GameSalad games?

Also, is there some way we can test our games on other devices before publishing them? I'm developing on a 2006 Macbook, which I realize isn't exactly state of the art, but it should be fast enough to run this game. But I'd like to test it on an iPad and see how it runs. Is that possible?

I'm willing to upload the game file somewhere if anyone wants to take a look at it. I have some huge graphics in the game, I have a timer running, and there are a lot of things that can collide with the main character and each other. I know all of those affect performance but I also need them so I may be stuck. Although I know I can break up the large graphics since most of them are just background.

Thanks.

->Later.....Spice

brickamator

If you have an apple developer account you can test it on a apple device. look it up on the forums

The_Gamesalad_Guru

If you're not testing on a device how do you know the frame rate?

devospice

I'm just going by testing it within GameSalad on my Macbook. Is there a way to build or compile the game to a standalone app to test that? Just wondering if it will run any better outside of the GS environment.

I do have a developer account. I'll look up how to do it. Thanks.

The_Gamesalad_Guru

Yeah you have to have it running on a device to see the real frame rate. GS preview is just a sandbox emulator.

devospice

OK, I found the problem. I went through my game and deleted everything but the main character and the floor so he had something to walk on. Still 3 FPS. So I started from scratch, made a new scene with a floor and a blank actor and didn't even made it walk. I just let it fall to the floor. 3 FPS. So I opened one of the tutorial games (the platform one) and played that. 3 FPS.

At this point I figured the problem may be with my computer so I went into the System Settings to make sure I didn't have any weird energy saver setting turned on for when I'm running on battery. Nothing. Then I looked at the Activity Monitor and looked at the amount of memory I had free/used/etc. It looked fine, but then I remembered something I read about recently. I can go into Terminal and issue a purge command to free up the locked memory and this puts it into a state similar to that after restarting.

A restart. This hadn't occurred to me. Like many Mac users I tend to just close my laptop when I'm done with it. I don't quit the apps unless I have to and I never restart the machine. This means that GameSalad has been running on my machine non-stop for about a month and a half.

I restarted and then launched my game. It played beautifully. Nice and smooth. No problems whatsoever.

So I don't know if I need to just quit GameSalad periodically or if I'll need to do a full reboot periodically, but at least I know what was causing the problems. The game was unplayable in that state and I was really getting concerned about it.

->Later.....Spice