Game crashing on iPad?

[xhedgehogx]

I'm very, very close to releasing my game. I'm just stuck at one tiny, little problem. The game will crash on the iPad! It runs perfect on my iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 3rd Gen.

On the iPad, I can go through the menus, but when I actually start playing the game, it crashes, and Xcode displays this:

2011-09-01 00:34:53.621 CyberPigeon[176:607] Received memory warning. Level=1
(gdb)

(Note that this message only came up in the Output once, every other time I ran it, it crashes in the same spot, but nothing new in output)

Obviously, something going on with the memory. I've rebooted the device, cleared anything out of the multitask bar. Is it possible switching it to armv7 only mode could cause this? I thought iPad fell into that category.

Anyway, normally I wouldn't really care, but Apple will not approve the app unless it can be run on the iPad with no problems. Please help! Let me know if there is any more information I can give.

Thank you!
Brian

Edit:
Just a quick note, it is running fine in the iPad Simulator. I know that's not exactly running on the same hardware or anything...

Another quick Edit:
Running instruments, on the menu screens, my game averages around 85mb of memory. Opening up the first level of gameplay, the memory leaps up to over 100 and the game crashes. According to various memory tools I have running on iPad, free memory is around 130mb. Theoretically, I'd imagine it should work, but obviously something is causing it not too.

[Anders]

That is very high memory usage.
For the iPhone 3G and 3GS they said MAX 20 megabytes of memory, they have probably made it higher for iPad. 80 megabytes is still way too much though.

A few things:
Do you have any really large audio files?
Do you have very long animations with large animation frames?

For the next version I have implemented a simple system that over time will release any graphics resources that haven't been in use for over 15 seconds. This might help some games with high memory usage (but it isn't a guarantee that it will).

[xhedgehogx]

It is very possible I was reading the memory wrong in instruments. Since. I still find it weird that it runs perfect on the 3rd generation iPod Touch.

But I do have one music file in there that might be the culprit. I haven't tested it yet, but what I did was switch it from flash runtime to iOS without changing any sound information.

Maybe possible something is going on with my iPad. Xcode pretty much frozen up as I was trying to get it set up. After about 5 minutes of sitting there it detected iOS 4.3.3, but found it as a "unknown version " and could not find in ipsw to restore to. Guess its time to put 4.3.5 on here...

Edit:
No large image files w/ lots of animations. Largest file I have would be the background, it's 480x320.

[Anders]

Can you try see if it still exits the game if you remove the large sound files?

[xhedgehogx]

Removing the music didn't fix it.

But what I did do was remove a couple sprites in there that I guess could be considered 'large'

And now it's running perfect on there. I guess back to the drawing board with those..

Unless there is a way to optimize these sprites so they will work happily in there?

[Anders]

Have you read this: http://www.clickteam.com/epicenter/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=241234#Post2412 34 ?

[xhedgehogx]

I've skimmed that earlier. But one of the ideas in there actually worked!

The color reduction did the trick!

Thank you very much!

[DavidN]

I just want to mention that after I saw this thread, I found the Color Reduction option performed absolute miracles on my own game as well - it's noticeably smoother. So thanks for bringing that up

[AndyH]

The Colour Reduction feature is really good, I use it all the time and it's only some objects (usually dark greys) that I have to override it. It's great that you can do that too when you need to

[Anders]

Color reduction works miracles because:
- It loads faster
- It uses less memory
- Better memory cache utilization
- (...which gives) faster rendering speeds
- (...and therefore) lower battery consumption

Do you guys/gals think it should be the default option and then people can turn it off for any objects where they see noticeable difference?