BIG Performance problems

ck

Have an iPad project that's just going haywire in the viewer. Really bad performance, despite optimized images, very little sound, not much movement (starting to sound boring, isn't it?), etc.

Despite really chasing this down, I'm getting less than 20 fps, and sometimes 8.

I was just comparing to HRS Media's post, and found some real anomalies by comparison:

HRS is recording:

Frames per Second: 60.17
Images: 12.7 MB
Sounds: 312 KB
Game Engine: 15.6 MB
Other: 5.9 MB
Total: 34.6 MB

http://gamesalad.com/forums/topic.php?id=8388#post-57829

I'm getting:

Frames per second: 18.73
Images: 9.5 MB
Sounds: 192 KB
Game Engine: 12.4 MB
Other: 64.4 MB
Total: 86.5 MB

What the hell goes in that "Other" category?

firemaplegames

Wow. Your slowdown is absolutely caused by the total RAM usage being at 86.5 MB.

I'm not sure what is in the mysterious 'Other' section, but that is definitely where the problem lies.

Do you have a lot of Actors in your Library?

That might be it. I'll dig around and see if I can think of anything. I think JGary did some tests a while back to determine what 'Other' means. I THINK it was the amount of Actors, I'm not sure.

Chunkypixels

Instead of having to guess, or try to work out what the "other" is.... maybe one of the Gendai yellow posters could just tell us.

its not like its information that might be helpful to us all.... and should already be in the Wiki or documentation, is it?!

JGary321

Never had much problem with the 'Other' category. This was my post regarding memory usage. Keep in mind this was months back & things might have changed with .87 when they optimized a lot of things.

http://gamesalad.com/forums/topic.php?id=4516

eaguirre

Some tips:

a) Review all you constrain attributes. Only use them when there is no other option. Use Change Attribute instead as much as possible. (Specially for setting images)

b) If you have a constrained image attribute like:

constraint self.image to "digit"..game.scoredigit..".png"

or a similar in you code. You should change it, so instead of being changed ever frame, you should do something like:

if game.updateScore is true..
game.updateScore is false
change attribute self.image to "digit"..game.scoredigit..".png"

And set the change attribute game.updateScore to true when you increment the score only.

c) if you application spawns and destroys a lot of objects for collision detection pruposes I suggest create them all the beginning and never detroy them. They will be gone as soon as you change to another scene.

d) split you scene in two if you have to much objects