cocos2d for iPhone

A fast, easy to use, free, and community supported 2D game engine

1. 

   vashpan
   Member

   Hi

   I'm adding quite big amount of child nodes ( sprites to sprite batch to be exact ) every game restart and it took some time, which could be noticeable for user. ( around 0.5 - 0.8 seconds ) I'm adding about 1500 sprites, so it is quite a big number. Of course, game is still running fine on 60fps after that, even on older devices - but loading time is an issue now ( Scene is "restarting" every 'game over', and game overs are very often in this game - so this could be an annoying thing for user )

   Of course I'm writing this post for a reason ;) I've checked in Instruments profiler and it seems that most of the loading time is spend on 'addChild' method of CCNode. So, my question is how can I optimize this process ? Any tips ?

   Cheers! And thanks again for @riq and others for this fantastic engine, thanks to them, my next game is nearly finished.

   Posted 9 months ago #
2. 

   varedis
   Moderator

   You mean the whole scene took 0.5 seconds to reset? that would barely be noticeable and I'm not sure optimizing for a tiny fraction of a second would be worth your time.

   Posted 9 months ago #
3. 

   vashpan
   Member

   More or less... More on bigger levels. And more on older devices...

   The problem is, that such a 'game restart' is sometimes very often, about each 4-5 seconds of gameplay, and is done automatically. Maybe this is not a big issue, but it could be annoying in some way.

   Posted 9 months ago #
4. 

   phil_me_up
   Member

   You mean the whole scene took 0.5 seconds to reset? that would barely be noticeable and I'm not sure optimizing for a tiny fraction of a second would be worth your time.

   I guess that depends on where the game freezes for 0.5 seconds. I agree it's not a huge amount of time but I'll bet there is a way to avoid it.

   My question would be: do you need to load in all these sprites immediately or can you delay the loading for some of them? If you can delay, then why not schedule a series of loads to break the processing down into smaller chunks?

   Posted 9 months ago #
5. 

   varedis
   Moderator

   If you are certain that most of the time is spent on addChild, then a possible solution to speed it up would to not add the sprites on every restart.

   You would have to add all your sprites in a method that only gets called when the scene first loads, then when you restart the game, instead of replacing the scene you need to reset all of the variables related to the scene and reposition all the sprites basically do everything else but re add the sprites again to give you a fresh game.

   But until you try it you won't know how this affects performance, if at all.

   Posted 9 months ago #
6. 

   vashpan
   Member

   @phil_me_up Unofortunately I can' load it in "parts" ( or - it could be pain to implement it now ;) )

   @varedis Yes, this is a proper solution, but unfortunately I should think about it sooner. Now game is almost finished, and such behavior need many changes in game logic, not as easy as simply reset variables... But of course this is still an option.

   I thought about some internal optimizetions, maybe some special version of sprite batch with preallocated nodes or something ?

   Posted 9 months ago #
7. 

   anterosilva
   Member

   I think replacing the scene is best.
   Why dont you have a loading screen when the scene is starting?

   Posted 9 months ago #
8. 

   araker
   Moderator

   @vashpan, you could try out the reorderChild branch, it also improves the addChild performance quite a bit. For some performance comparisons look at this topic.

   Posted 9 months ago #
9. 

   vashpan
   Member

   @anterosilva Mainly because "game overs" are very often - so 'restarts' too. You will see in the upcoming trailer what I'm talking about ;) Second thing is - 0.5-0.8 seconds is still quite fast and I thonk event liittle bit too fast for loading scene, but still could be annoying for the user.

   @araker Thanks! I will check it out

   Posted 9 months ago #
10. 

    vashpan
    Member

    Merged with 'reorderSprite' branch - and loading performance is now doubled :) Thanks @araker! Of course 'freeze' is still visible on bigger levels ( biggest ones... ) but is now 'acceptable'

    Thanks all for your tips!

    Posted 9 months ago #

RSS feed for this topic

Reply

You must log in to post.