Problems with 5s? 5c and ipad2 getting better performance

RossmanBrothersGames

I recently posted about experiencing some performance issues with my game. With many hours of work and creative thinking I was luckily able to greatly improve the performance of the game. Thanks @fryingbaconstudios and @matarua for some advice that was helpful for that process. Now I am running into a strange issue and wonder if anyone is experiencing the same, or might know what is causing it. For testing I have my second gen iPad, my wife's 5c, and my 5s. Interestingly my game now runs great on my iPad2, near flawless on the iphone 5c, and has the most noticible lags on my 5s??? Strange huh. Its not terrible or anything, but definitely the most noticeable. Anyone else have a 5s that tests weird?
Strange thing is my 5s runs all other games a I play fine, including some of the other users gamesalad games I have checked out like Steam Punks, Heavy Sword, Puck it. I have restarted my 5s, closed all the background apps, bluetooth is off. My wife's phone actually had a ton of apps open when testing. It could seem that I might have a bad device, but I would think that is very unlikely, especially since I have noticed no other performance issues on the phone.
Any thoughts, some setting I might have on, does Gamesalad not work great yet with the new A7 chip? Would that even make sense? Do a lot of you test on a 5s?
Incase this info helps I am running an Adhoc build to test, and the problem seems to get slightly worse over time, not sure what is going on there. And these are just little tiny lags, but they are not happening on the other devices, at least at near the frequency.
Any help is greatly appreciated, I'm getting so close to making this game great, can't wait to show some info on it when it is more ready. Much thanks will need to be given to the people on these boards.

RossmanBrothersGames

Just played the most problematic level in the game over and over on the iphone 5c with not a single noticeable lag or frame skip at all, with these happening regularly on the 5s. So strange.

natzuur

Run it through xcode instruments for a very accurate measurement and pay attention to the ram usage. I suspect that may be part of the issue, if its dumping memory mid scene it will cause spikes. If the spikes aren't bad pay attention to the core animation (frame rate) and see if you can find anything out there.

see http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/49268/gamesalad-and-xcode-instruments if you need help using it.

RossmanBrothersGames

@natzuur thanks I will give that a go and see what I can learn. Still doesn't make sense to me that this would only be happening on the 5s and running perfectly on less powerful devices. I'll have to run each device through xcode and see what is going on.

natzuur

Yeah I know 5s is running 64 bit OS with 32 bit support instead of pure 32 bit and that may have some factoring into it with the A7 chip. Theoretically if GS apps were running 64 bit it might be the cause because "A 64-bit application will require more memory to open any particular file than a 32-bit application, because the address sizes of memory pointers and other structures automatically become larger." But GS apps should be running in 32 bit mode.

Another thing to consider is it's altogether slightly less stable. see: http://allthingsd.com/20131011/apps-on-iphone-5s-crashing-at-twice-the-rate-as-on-iphone-5-iphone-5c/ but still shouldnt have more than a very minimal impact.

Hopefully Instruments can provide some insight, look for flags and other important information as it runs (shows as little marks during the timeline).

matarua

@erockross sorry been travelling but what @natzuur says is the best I can answer too - the only other thing that has been a factor is a dodgy build - that is just when a build on a phone just runs like plop with frame drops. To solve that delete the app and all it's data associated to it. Do a fresh build, copy that on to the phone - don't replace the old app, delete the old app first - and then see how it goes?

Cheers, M@

RossmanBrothersGames

@matarua thanks, I have actually tried that deleting the old app, doing a new build, loading it in. Still same problem. Is there any chance I am not deleting all of the data off?

RossmanBrothersGames

found a problem trying to test my game using xcode instruments. Instruments causes the app to close and reload, but my problems on the 5s are most prevalent when the app has been open on the device for some time, initially the app runs pretty well. Not sure how to fix this problem, emailed game salad, not sure if they will have some insight for me, game still runs perfect on slower devices even when being open on the devices for weeks...