Performance ?????

Shanesta

So I'm testing my game on a 3rd gen iPod touch, and just having the player moving around, and shooting, which spawns 4 actors, muzzle flash, smoke puff, bullet, and bullet trail. Just doing these simple things is causing pretty big hitches when you shoot. Is performance really going to be this bad with GameSalad? Why cant it handle such simple tasks? Is GameSalad running some sort of interpreted code? Just doing these task should not be this slow.

jhaas

I'm experiencing the exact same issues. I've spent the last two days "Optimizing" the simplest of 3 games I have. The best I can get is a game that will play for 10 minutes before it either slows up or stops responding.

It seems that even simple games require a lot more effort than I think they should.

For something that is supposed to free me from the grief of xcode - this isn't turning out like I was expecting.

Cobra

The dev team is continuing to work on performance optimizations. I can't speak to specifics right now, but rest assured that we're listening to the community's feedback on this issue.

@Shanesta,
Forgive me, I'm not familiar with your game, but perhaps spawning four separate actors every time you shoot is a bit much? If you can combine these graphic effects onto a smaller number of actors, or "recycle" actors by having them appear/disappear rather than spawn/destroy each time, or come up with other ways to achieve the same visual effect, you'll probably see a significant improvement in performance.

Shanesta

Hi Cobra, I am making a top down shooter type game, and I could optimize a few things, like add the muzzle flash in with the character graphic, but the bullet needs to be separate from the trail for collision reasons, and the smoke puff need to be independent from the guy so that it does not rotate with him. As for reusing these things, that would depend on fire rate, and how many you have on screen at once.

Bottom line is, if it is already gaging on this, then the future of this game is looking bad. I would have to rip out all the things that make it cool for it to be playable.

quantumsheep

Hey Shanesta,
I feel your pain, I really do, but there's a lot to check before you start chucking stuff out. I was advised to throw out some cool stuff, but I've managed to keep it in with some cuts here and there in other areas that were less important.

Indeed there's a lot more that I'm thinking about that could help.

On another game tonight, I found out by accident that all my enemy images were 32x30 rather than 32x32. I changed it straight away of course, and it's made a MASSIVE difference. The game's running on my ipod touch 1st gen when it used to crash after 10 minutes. It's been going almost an hour now.

Have a search on the forums. Lots of people have suggested ways of optimising their games for the ipod/iphone. I think it might really help!

Cheers,

QS

sdpardue

QS,

That's surprising that changing your images from 32x30 to 32x32 would make such a huge difference, when the 32x30 would take the same amount of memory as the 32x32, if I understand the dynamics correctly.

There must be some other significant inefficiency regarding the processing of non-power-of-two images.

Hmm... Makes me wonder if I'd be better off performance-wise having appropriately positioned 512x512 images for my scene backgrounds, instead of 480x320.

JGary321

The problem with a program like GS is that everyone (myself included when I first started) thinks that it should just work. If the creator can do it, it should just work. We don't keep in mind that the iPhone is not unlimited. They've said numerous times that spawning takes a lot of resources. I'm sure this is something they are working on improving, but try recycling actors. Try move instead of spawn. It's more work, but better performance by far.

Also let's all remember they aren't calling this EARLY ACCESS for no reason. The program is still technically Beta. This will be improved. The early access is basically just letting people publish some simple games right now. You can create more complex games, but you definitely need to put thought into performance.

So lets all just relax, grab a big cup of (insert favorite beverage here), & wait on improvements. Peace guys, much love.

JGary

eboy

For these reasons alone, the iphone viewer app should be included and not a paid for addition. Let the pay service be for the publishing aspect. If you cant test your game, what's the point.

superNES

Until the Viewer is on the App Store, this is how it will be distributed. The pay service is for publishing to iPhone, which includes the ability to test for iPhone. The free service is for making games for the Web and for sharing with others.

SDMG

hmmm... i have 4 unfinished games ... 2 of them are very very simple and they are running with 30fps... (they don't have any moving objects nor collisions

But they are loading for 20sec and this is very long ;(

3. game is crashing after 10 sec. 20fps, stottering... some strange behaviours i haven't seen before...

4. game spawns 15 actors at the beginning and YES this is a no go )

Well so far ... its time to optimize... oh and beside this ...the WIKI on how to setup this provisioning-certificating-ID-etc-thing is PRICELESS!

I am pretty sure i would never have accomplished this on my own!

Thank You!

SDMG

hmm... i have changed my 4. game so all my actors are getting now preloaded... but unfortunatly that didn't solved the problem...

so i have 13 moving collidable actors in the whole game (always 11 on screen 2 outside)... power of 2 on every image ... absolutly no spawning and all sounds converted to ogg.

No chance to play this at the moment ;(

so i think i concentrate now on my simplier games

Oh and in my 3. game i have an animated start screen with 10 moving actors... the viewer tells me that i have 40fps but when you look at the actors they are all slightly stottering... (?)

CodeMonkey

Something else you might want to take a look at is how much memory you game is using. The stats should give you details about images, sounds, game engine, other, and total.

On my iPod Touch 1G it runs out at about 59MB then crashes.

SDMG

4. Game

Total: 50MB, Game Engine: 42MB

3. Game crashes after 3 min at:

Total: 30MB, Game Engine: 12MB

oh and i have an ipod touch 8GB/ 2.Generation

SDMG

Btw is it possible to animate the moveable-option ?

Not that i am doing it at the moment but i was thinking about to turn this option off for actors that are offscreen to save processing power but at my last try it seemed to have no effect ...

So is there a way to switch actors on/off?