What determines if a scene "stays active" or not?

TomCoffee

Soo.. Here's something I've noticed with apps I've made with GameSalad. Simple scenario:

There are two scenes. The initial scene has a button that goes to a second scene - the "play" scene. The play scene has actors that move around and do stuff (that's the actual game).

I can start the app, go to the play scene and play for a few minutes. Say I get bored and hit the HOME button (iOS for the moment)... i check Facebook, Twitter, I put the phone down, take a walk, etc...

10 minutes later I come back, double-tap home button and I can scroll back to my game.. and VOILA! I'm back in the play scene and I'm continuing my game exactly where it left off.

But if I come back 5 HOURS later (instead of 10 minutes) the app resets and sends me back to the initial scene when I double-tap home and bring it up.

Why? What determines whether I go into the play scene (where I left it) or whether I end up going back to the initial scene?

-Tom

Armelline

I'm pretty sure this is OS level. It's been a long time since I made an app in Xcode, but last time I did there was a force timeout after 10 minutes. I'm pretty sure this got reduced to 3 minutes in iOS 7. If the app is using either a background push or a remote fetch, I'm pretty sure that resets this time limit.

Since all our apps are essentially, at their base, GameSalad, and GameSalad doesn't do either of these things in the background, I don't think we have any way of extending this timeout window.

Will need @CodeWizard or someone to jump in and comment to be sure, though.