Newbie Questions

[jregork]

1. Are scrolling layers basically out? Ran my somewhat minimalist game on os5 and the slowdown made it unplayable. I had a separate background layer. Put everything into one layer and it runs like a dream. 60fps.

2. fastloops. How much of a drain are these? I know on an older computer I've tested on, bringing the fastloops down made a huge difference in the same game (with scrolling layers still intact). Going from 1000 to 100 on one even made a difference. And going from 100 to 50- did too. I think we're used to a lot of processing power so we just type a random big number for fastlooping even when it's not necessary.

3.Color reduction mode: I'm not super clear on what it does exactly. I understand decreasing the color count, but what does "This Option will divide the size of your images by 2." mean exactly? I used this option in my second test and it made a huge speed difference (simulated testing, I hadn't gotten it running on a device at that point) but the sprites still looked fine. Definitely not reduced by 1/2. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what images means.

4. Apple documentation. I had to read through a bunch of tutorials from apple to get things running, but clickteam's pdfs on the ios exporter recommend reading apples documentation. Most of this is about coding/blah/etc. that isn't relevant to us using mmf2. Are there any specific documents on Apple's site that would be super-relevant to our needs, and could someone point me to them?

5. Aaah! Just venting. I definitely had a full day getting things up and running. I won't complain though. That's an amazing turnaround. Considering 20 years ago the work involved in getting a game up and running and the limited tools to do it with, we are VERY lucky to have tools like this. I'm mostly just overwhelmed by all the sites, tutorials, and such that I have gone through today, and the fact that I don't truly understand most of it. I have my end result. But when it comes time to do it again, It'll be the same ballgame!

6. Another question. Or maybe suggestion. MMF has a 'pause' option, where the game can be unpaused by hitting a key. I'm guessing this does not translate to ios? It would be really good if there was a simple action for pausing and unpausing the game, or maybe a pause object that appears as a button?

7. And one more question, when looking at the allocations, is Live Bytes the relevant number I should be looking at?

[Francois]

1. A lot of games are using layers on iOS. Is the speed bad under the iOS simulator or on the device? The simulator is slow for scrollings. iOS runtime is hardware accelerated.
2. Yes, fastloops are slower on mobile devices. You have to program your app with a mminimum of them.
3. It reduces the amount of colors, thus making the images smaller. It is a cool option, if you application has a lot of graphics youshoudl use it.
4. You should read the doc on how to submit your game to Apple. If you user the GameCenter objects, it is recommended to read the doc.

[jregork]

1. The speed is slow on the device itself. It is a brand new ipod 4g with ios 5.0. It runs ok on the simulator. I'm using 480x320 resolution. Color Reduction. In testing it's coming up as 8.41mb under Live Bytes. There were two things I changed when I went from severe slowdown to perfectly smooth gameplay. A. I removed the scrolling background layer. And B. I changed the framerate from 50 to 60. I'm guessing that the layers are what made the difference, not the framerate change.

2. -

3. Got it. The wording was just a bit confusing. It sounds as if the actual size (dimensions) of the images will be decreased. Maybe the wording should be changed to "This Option will divide the FILE size of your images by 2."

4. Thanks.

6. Another question. Or maybe suggestion. MMF has a 'pause' option, where the game can be unpaused by hitting a key. I'm guessing this does not translate to ios? It would be really good if there was a simple action for pausing and unpausing the game, or maybe a pause object that appears as a button?

7. And one more question, when looking at the allocations, is Live Bytes the relevant number I should be looking at?

[AyreGuitar]

jregork - For 6. Pausing - use the Q&A object. I did an example on this thread:
http://community.clickteam.com/showthread.php?t=65291
Note you want the second example - the first doesn't use the QA object!

[Anders]

6: As AyreGuitar said - the Question and Answer object will pause your game with a iOS styled button. Your game will be unpaused again when it is gone again.

7: Yes Live Bytes is the one to look at. It should only increase when your app loads new resources to display for the first time. In the beta we will be releasing soon'ish there is a resource "garbage collector" that frees texture resources that isn't used in a timespan over 15 seconds to ensure that the game doesn't fill up memory if you have huge frames with many different resources different places.
Once it has found a batch of resources to free it will do so spread out evenly over the next 15 seconds. This allows you to use more memory in one frame than what the device can hold as long as it isn't on the screen at the same time.

[buckeroo]

@Andos, #7 would be a welcomed addition. Automatic garbage collection is always handy.

[EdibleWare]

I am so worryed about scrolling right now - _-'

[Anders]

Can you try setting the framerate to 60 and leave everything else unchanged?(include the scrolling background)
How does that run?

[jregork]

Just tried it with only the 60fps change. Still runs very slowly.

I saw the topic about using the Q&A object to pause, but the last comment seemed to imply that the Q&A button pops up in portrait mode even if the game is played in landscape. That was my only concern. . .