Startup screen + lag

austincolepage

Hello forums! I have two questions for you guys today

The first would be addressing the startup/splash screen I think it's called. I don't actually want one for my game, I would prefer it to load straight into the game, is there a way to disable the feature? I know when you're publishing it, it's a mandatory feature and if you leave it blank it just shows a black screen instead which is even worse. Even if the screen is a mandatory feature, how can I make it last 1 second rather than the 4-5 it takes usually?:\

Second, I would like to know how to reduce the lag in my game, make it run really smooth, like I see so on the computer. How can I do this?

Hopscotch

@austincolepage‌ , the Splash screen gets displayed while your actual game is loaded into memory, so the length of time it gets displayed is related to the complexity of your game overall (code size) and the amount of assets it needs to load for the first screen. Therefore it is better to display something while the user is waiting.

As to your second point, lag, you would have to give more info for us to be able to give suggestions. What device are you running on?

austincolepage

@Hopscotch said:
austincolepage‌ , the Splash screen gets displayed while your actual game is loaded into memory, so the length of time it gets displayed is related to the complexity of your game overall (code size) and the amount of assets it needs to load for the first screen. Therefore it is better to display something while the user is waiting.

As to your second point, lag, you would have to give more info for us to be able to give suggestions. What device are you running on?

I will release it initially on the iPhone and iPod. I am personally running it on an iPhone5 and it isn't the smoothest. What helps reduce lag? Would pre-loading art help reduce lag? Would changing all my pictures from high-quality .jpg files to .png files help? What else can I do? Thanks

Hopscotch

@austincolepage‌ , how complicated are your scenes?

Is the actual gameplay laggy (may point to suboptimal code) or just the loading of scenes (may point to too many/big images).

Your images should be PNG anyway. See here:

http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/67365/problems-with-png-images-use-these-methods-to-fix-your-pngs

Generally, in my experience you can throw quite a lot at an iPhone5 before it gets laggy (given that the code is OK).

austincolepage

@Hopscotch said:
austincolepage‌ , how complicated are your scenes?

Is the actual gameplay laggy (may point to suboptimal code) or just the loading of scenes (may point to too many/big images).

Your images should be PNG anyway. See here:

http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/67365/problems-with-png-images-use-these-methods-to-fix-your-pngs

Generally, in my experience you can throw quite a lot at an iPhone5 before it gets laggy (given that the code is OK).

My project size is 1.7mb, too much?

UtopianGames

It should run super smooth on iPhone 5 (I always test my projects and templates on an old iPad 1 and aim for 60 fps) so without looking at your game/code I'm not sure why it's laggy.

We have a tool (free) that will turn off all of the pre load images but if the size is only 1.7mb which is very small I'm guessing there's not a lot of images or music.

Have you got lots of actors spawning that are movable and are these movable actors also spawning more movable actors?

Darren.

austincolepage

@DeepBlueApps said:
It should run super smooth on iPhone 5 (I always test my projects and templates on an old iPad 1 and aim for 60 fps) so without looking at your game/code I'm not sure why it's laggy.

We have a tool (free) that will turn off all of the pre load images but if the size is only 1.7mb which is very small I'm guessing there's not a lot of images or music.

Have you got lots of actors spawning that are movable and are these movable actors also spawning more movable actors?

Darren.

How ironic, the app is a remake of your template "Sheep Stacker"! :P I changed it up totally though, like ground up, and I have it so its unlimited so I guess when you hit 100 you have 100 crates spawned in

Do you mind messaging me or even emailing me at austincolepage@hotmail.com? That would be awesome!

UtopianGames

Sounds like that's your problem 100 movable actors all colliding.

I think you have 2 options...make it harder (like the original template) so its not possible to get that many stacked or when the stack gets to say 30 replace the 10th actor with a dummy and destroy the bottom 10 and so on so there's only 20 or so movable blocks on the scene at any one time.

Darren.

austincolepage

@DeepBlueApps said:
Sounds like that's your problem 100 movable actors all colliding.

I think you have 2 options...make it harder (like the original template) so its not possible to get that many stacked or when the stack gets to say 30 replace the 10th actor with a dummy and destroy the bottom 10 and so on so there's only 20 or so movable blocks on the scene at any one time.

Darren.

Is there anyway I can maybe make it destroy itself when it is outside of the scene? If not, how would i go about replacing them with dummy's? Thanks

austincolepage

@DeepBlueApps said:
Sounds like that's your problem 100 movable actors all colliding.

I think you have 2 options...make it harder (like the original template) so its not possible to get that many stacked or when the stack gets to say 30 replace the 10th actor with a dummy and destroy the bottom 10 and so on so there's only 20 or so movable blocks on the scene at any one time.

Darren.

Could I maybe pay you to take a look at it and clean up the code?

austincolepage

Wow, thank you so much Darren! You helped me out a lot! Cheers

UtopianGames

No problem it only took 10 minutes to look through and notice several areas that could cause the problems so no payment needed.

Darren.