my app is super slooow on iPhone 3GS

[mobo]

I created a small game and tested it fine in xCode (4.3.2) iphone simulator (5.1) (well.....everything was in slow motion ) but after installing it on iPhone 3GS it runs super slow....kindda like 2 FPS. I don't have many objects, everything is sized in power of 2, some alpha-channel images, the game is in native 480x320 resolution (Direct 9 in app properties). One of the active objects has alpha-channel images that created "Always" to simulate a fire....Could that be a problem? What other things I should look at?

****UPDATE*****

I forgot to mention - I do have 3 layers scrolling as well. Also, I coded everything in MMF2 before I installed the iOS exporter and there are no objects from the exporter in the game.

***********ANOTHER UPDATE***********

I think I might know what the problem is. My level is very long (about 32,000 pixels wide) and always scrolling. After I reduced to a 1000 pixels it played OK. I will look more into it to see at what size it stops working.

Thanks,
mobo

[Koji_Kabuto]

In my humble opinion, should no longer see 3GS as a market for their apps, I'm sure its installed base is very poor today.

[Verbage]

The thing about the MMF2 exporter is it's converting everything in the MMF2 runtime for iOS, that includes things that don't get used. Unfortunately that's the nature of exporters. If you take a look at the classes and code you can see things that may never get used get converted over. If you know some objective-C you could play around with it to try and optimize it.

My Minesweeper game runs flawless on my 4S, but is somewhat slow on my iPod Touch 3rd gen. I'm going to try and shift my object-based events to math-based, because that relieves a ton of memory for iOS.

[Pineapple]

Uncheck the fine collision option for every object that doesn't need it. That may give you a speed boost.

[Verbage]

What is fine-collision by definition?

[mobo]

Well.....I don't think that size of the frame matters much in my case. I did the following:
1. Left all the objects and play area size as it is.
2. All graphics effects and collision detection as it is.
3. Removed ALL of the code and left only scrolling code.

RESULT: it plays MUCH faster in simulator. I still have to check it on my iPhone when I get back home. My guess - there is something in my code that causes the slowdown. I will try to re-code it line-by-line and see what the root of the problem is.

[DTownTony]

Just curious, are you running your game in debug or release mode?

[mobo]

I am running in debug mode. Here is the latest - I think it is a combination of some coding bugs ( I had to clean up my collisions code and some movement code), the frame size (I had to reduce it by 3 times) and a number of active objects in the level.
I think the number of actives is the biggest factor here. I am thinking about creating some of them during run time outside of the frame window. I finally managed to run it on iPhone pretty smooth, but not all of the code is in yet.

[DTownTony]

Mobo - Running in Debug mode will always slow your game down DRASTICALLY. Try release mode, it should speed things up. Check this thread, it has all the little tricks on speeding your game up - http://community.clickteam.com/showthread.php?t=65324

[mobo]

I just found out that it runs pretty smooth and fast on my son's iPod. Still trying to get equally fast on iphone....getting closer. Reducing the number of active objects helps a lot.