Why is iOS performance so poor?

[ratty]

What is it about MMF2 iOS exporting that leads to such poor performance on the actual iOS device? A blank screen with 8 objects, using two colors between them, a bit of math for movement and some semi-transparency ends up lagging out pretty bad on an iPhone 4S. Why is that such a heavy load? I ask not out of complaint but rather curiosity. Clearly, professionally released apps are jam packed with sounds, graphics, visual effects and still run smooth as can be. I understands projects aren't professional by any stretch of the imagination, but the performance is so dismal.

Anyway, just curious.

[DaveC]

Ive never seen any slowdown at all testing on a 4s.. the first/second gen phones are pretty slow.. but the new stuff is lightning fast (my game has about 200 objects with hundreds of lines of code.) you must be doing something wrong...

[Pineapple]

maybe you should post an example. I get pretty good performance out of my ipod touch 4th gen, often better than on my crappy pc laptop. There are some things that can cause slowdown though. Have you read through the "faster games with less memory usage" thread?

[ratty]

I'll get an example together and see what I can demonstrate.

What size graphics do you guys use? What do you do for more HD graphics?

[Pineapple]

For hd stuff, I just use higher res art unless that means I'm going to need huge active objects. If an active is going to be over 128x128, I use a smaller object stretched 2x.

[Javira]

Locate Runtime options for you app and each frame. Set framerate and movement timer to 60fps and remove v-sync under display mode

Remember sprites should be a power of two. Large sprites with transparency are killer. So a 385x385 takes up 512x512 in mem. Split sprites up instead or use scale runtime.

This is not specific to MMF, there are several tricks that pro game artist should have in mind with delivering art for games.

[ratty]

Here's the app in question. I understand the actives are rather large...and use tranparency. How would you guys go about tweaking this? Additionally, how would you go about tweaking it without losing graphic quality (not that these graphics are amazing or anything)? I'd like the black likes to be sharp and the circles to, well, look circular and sharp as well. I had sounds playing on collisions as well but I stripped them out for now. Not sure how much that affects things.

Tap/Swipe/Release to create the red balls. Hold tap for larger, longer-living red balls. Currently has a poor circular movement to speed up the spinning...ignore how it doesn't work right.
example.mfa

[Pineapple]

I tried loading this, but couldn't because I don't have the foreach object extension installed.

I don't know if foreach is supported in iOS... maybe that's the reason for the poor performance?

[loglady]

ratty, I don't know what you want to do with this but I think that you could have the same result just using an image of a hexagon and rotate it. If you want to scale it down and up, you can set the maximum scale to the image size (or a bit less) and them allow the user to scale it down or up to this maximum size.
Just to add, it's not (in this case) an iOS exporter problem. I tried your .mfa on my Intel Core 2 Quad (4gb ram, ATI Radeon 5750HD) and got "awesome" 16fps. You must remember that if you are going to export it to iOS, everything must run fine using the Standard Display Mode (applications property > runtime options > display options).

If (and it's just and example) I set the display mode to DirectX 9, this .mfa runs smoothly at 60fps. Sadly it is only possible on Windows applications as the iOS only support OpenGL.

Any image that rotate on screen is a heavy load to any device and Apple's stuff, despite the advertisement, is not that all powerful and can be tagged as a mid-low device if compared to an Android device of same price.

I think that the great advantage of iOS devices is that you don't need 5 or more different devices to test your application before launching it.

I hope this helps...

[ratty]

I'll definitely look into the advice you guys have given. Unfortuantely, I do need each side of the hexagon to register independently of the others, so I'll have to play around and see what I can pull off. Thanks guys. Keep any info coming if you have ideas.