No it does not : iOS runtime is hardware accelerated, meaning that we draw all the sprites at once. We do not save anything.
No it does not : iOS runtime is hardware accelerated, meaning that we draw all the sprites at once. We do not save anything.
Can someone please point me to tutorial or instructions on how to scale a background once an application starts? From doing one or two google searches it seems that it is not as easy as creating a 'scale image at runtime' event....
Say you have a solid 8x8 image (in the frame at 0,0).
960/8 = 120
640/8 = 80
+ Start of frame
[Active] Scale / Angle > Set X Scale to 120 (Quality = 0)
[Active] Scale / Angle > Set Y Scale to 80 (Quality = 0)
That will scale it to the size of your screen.
You could probably just use the default frame background colour in the frame properties if it is a solid colour. The active object won't repeat itself, so if you are using a non-solid coloured active object, you may be better using a quick backdrop.
My experience on the performance of iOS runtime has so far been rather positive, but with some surprises.
In some cases it's much faster than the Flash runtime by comparison. For example, this game runs quite nicely on the iPad and is faster than the equivalent Flash version. I think it's mostly thanks to the hardware acceleration.
The biggest surprise has been that changing Alterable Values on an Always event (or other events, but no fastloop used) seems to cause slow down when you have many - but reasonable amount - active objects on the screen simultaneously. Talking about dozens of actives, maybe up to 100 or so, but something that the Flash runtime was able to handle without issues. This has been a way bigger problem for me than, for instance, alpha channels. Quite weird.
As a result, when converting my old flash games to iOS, I've run into a situation where a game which I thought might have some performance issues on iOS actually did NOT require any fine-tuning or reduction of graphical assets at all, but a game which I thought would be perfectly fine on iOS was impossible (for me at least) to get running smoothly enough. So it's quite different than the Flash runtime in terms of performance based on my experiences so far.
I was wondering, is a graphic with a single level alpha channel (old MMF style - hard edged) just as slow as a soft edged alpha with varying alpha levels? I'm assuming yes, but just want some clarification.
Let me try and get a couple of things cleared up here. When I saw that it only supports iOS 4, I thought you were referring to iPhone 4/iTouch equivalent/iPad, etc. But researching iOS 4, it seems to also be supported by iPhone 3G and 3GS. From my experience, it's unrealistic and unfair to make such promises. I bought an iPhone 3G second hand with the hope of being able to test out some iPhone MMF games, and maybe one day buying a license.
Vincere Totus Astrum however ran really badly. It was a good game, yes, but the performance was terrible. Should I expect the performance to be a lot better for other games? Because to be honest, I feel as if the iPhone was a waste of money after all and I might sell it and save up money to get an iPhone 4 eventually, since from what I've experienced so far the 3G is not suitable for MMF applications.
I'm still running a 3G too, as I figured I might as well hold out for iphone 5 for my next purchase as it's only weeks away now, despite having interest in developing for iOS. The model is over 3 years old now, it's hardware is severely limited compared to even the 3GS yet alone 4. Hell, it's even sluggish when you browse or write texts these days.
So all that considered, you're never going to get any complex action games running smoothly on it using the exporter. Anything I make in it seems to run at around 16fps. If you're developing for 3G, the trick is to make something that will work just fine at that frame-rate.
Generally speaking, people should adopt the newer models as it becomes cheaper to get hold of them, and the good news is that the performance different between 3G and 3GS is quite a significant improvement. Where things run at 16fps on 3G, they seem to have no trouble keeping at double that or more on 3GS.
Has anyone tried out any scrolling game with parallax backgrounds?
Or perhaps it doesn't matter since its still backgrounds.
is there any way to turn off image filtering when the display is sized up? Quite hard to make a game with a pixel-art look otherwhise...
After about 2 weeks of slowdown and performance hickups I think that I have finally nailed it, besides setting your game to final release in Xcode you also want to change the optimization level to fastest,smallest [-0s], this gave me back so much fluidity in my 30fps game that I am amazed, again, at the iOS exporter :P
Not sure about alpha as I only have one item using it which is a 3rd button but the ink effects run rather sweet this time around, I have quite a few 'lights' in my game one of them being resized from 32x32 to 12 times the size and it's not pushing the performance on a 4g touch much at all, there is about 8 lights in a scene overall.Originally Posted by Ramses
I think that the device is doing it with hardware instead of processor power, I could be wrong. Some ink effects do not work or crash the very old devices.
iOS options when you click on your main game file in mmf2, it's a tick box. I missed this the first time around also.
I think an ipod touch is the best right now for iOS exporting, a 4g is the same power as the iphone 4, it only has half the ram but this is good to stop you bloating up a game you are making with the problems of it only working in large ram devices, you can also get an 8gb 4g touch for £150 which is damn good value for money even right now.
This is from my own experience mind you, not tried my games on a 3gs.
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