Long scene loads -- What is behind them?
pHghost
London, UKMember Posts: 2,342
We all know that sometimes scenes load quite long. Oh, the dreaded spinning wheel. Right?
But what causes a scene load so long? Is it the amount of actors/graphics that need to be loaded? To be honest, I don't think so, in this department GameSalad seems to do quite well. Here's what I think is going on.
Currently, I'm not actively working on a game (because I am waiting for certain delayed features to be able to continue), and so instead I'm playing a bit with trying to optimize one of my projects. In the current iteration, I have two scenes -- one menu, nearly empty, with just a button (display text) and one image -- and one for gameplay, where I'm loading a decent-size map, several images and a lot of logic. You can freely switch between the scenes. Guess which one loads longer?
If you guessed the complicated scene loads longer, you are wrong. And it isn't even a tiny margin! The simple menu scene loads about four times longer!
The reason I think this is happening, is because in the background memory is being dumped. The more complex the scene, the longer the load following after it. And as experience of many shows, apps still crash and devices run out of memory. It seems memory management is quite the elusive demon for the GameSalad team -- not just with the Creator, but in general.
Something to be looked at?
But will people vote for it, or will they prefer another ad revenue stream?
Comments
I have the same problem and I recently tried an older version of the creator, because I was recommended a one that works, but I get the spinning wheel in many versions, so every time the spinning wheel comes and its spinning from 10sek to minutes, very annoying, I restart GS, and like 5 minutes i have faster reaction in the creator when Im pressing back button for instance, but then the more time goes the more I have to wait for the spinning wheel to stop,
I think I stop working sometimes because motivation is going down the drain. This waiting and waiting and waiting... very very tiresome... I have been looking at updates too and I didn't find any update or nothing they looked at to fix, In my opinion this is the first thing they should be looking at, not upgrading some other features. This would not make a good program better if they ignore the fact that this error still exists.
Start with this thread: http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/44707/timers-are-for-chumps-gs-optimization-tips/p1
Next, i've started doing an intermittent scene for scene loading that has a clear loading sign in the center.....it's a transition scene that makes it better for the user because they at least know that something is happening....
I was primarily talking about loading scenes in a published iOS game (running on an iPhone 6 no less, so quite a lot of processing power there). Yes, there is a longstanding problem with GS Creator as well (which is supposedly getting addressed soon). I agree this should be primary focus, to get these things solved, but as I mentioned, it's not very likely, since a lot of people make primarily small (single-scene) games, and won't vote for a 'feature' as this -- even though it's quite a serious bug, in my opinion.
Thanks, I am familiar with it. I don't have issues with timers, the scenes themselves run great. The main data I am working with in this particular project is a lot of tables. I have several tables 100x100 or more cells in size. Loading and writing to them in the scene is fairly straightforward, but once I want to switch away from the scene, the load is crazy long. I am actually doing something similar to what you are suggesting, though instead of the extra scene, I just spawn a big loading image at the end of the scene I am leaving and the same at the start of the scene I'm entering, so it looks smooth. But the fact remains that the problem seems to be memory management. This simply seems to be one of the symptoms of that. Others have apps who crash completely once the memory builds up and isn't released properly.