CocosDenshion iPod vs. iPhone « cocos2d for iPhone

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CocosDenshion iPod vs. iPhone

(15 posts) (4 voices)

Started 2 years ago by anothercastleneil
Latest reply from anothercastleneil

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anothercastleneil
Member

We're having memory issues with our test iPhone and believe that it has to do with SimpleAudioEngine. The more levels that are loaded, the more memory our game takes up.

We lose around 2MB per level which eventually results in an out of memory exception. It's odd because we got rid of all of the sounds and it only has our underlying memory leaks of around 25-30K.

When we run it on the iPod touch it leaks around the same (30K or so).

We've concluded that it must have something to do with the iPhone hardware and CocosDenshion. Does anyone have any idea of whats going on?

Thanks!

Posted 2 years ago #

Have you investigated using the new AVFoundation libraries? They are really nice and take up a very small foot print. Its new to 3.1. I tried several of the engines online - even some that used OpenAL and found they were all memory pigs consuming several megabytes of memory. With the AFFoundation (i.e. the AVAudioPlayer) it is very sweet and consumes a fraction of the memory.

Here is some code for doing a simple AudioEngine:

AudioEngine.h

#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>
#import <AVFoundation/AVAudioPlayer.h>

@interface AudioEngine : NSObject {
	NSMutableDictionary *players;
}
@property (retain, nonatomic) NSMutableDictionary *players;

+ (AudioEngine *) sharedEngine;

- (void) addSound:(NSString *)key name:(NSString *)theName ofType:(NSString *)theType delegate:(id)theDelegate loop:(BOOL)loopFlag;
- (AVAudioPlayer *) getPlayer:(NSString *)key;
- (void) playSoundWithKey:(NSString *)key volume:(double)gain;
- (void) stopSoundWithKey:(NSString *)key;
- (BOOL) isSoundPlaying:(NSString *)key;
- (void) vibrate;

@end

AudioEngine.m

#import "AudioEngine.h"
#import "AudioToolbox/AudioToolbox.h"

@implementation AudioEngine

@synthesize players;

static AudioEngine *_sharedEngine = nil;

+ (AudioEngine *) sharedEngine
{
	@synchronized( [AudioEngine class] )
	{
		if( !_sharedEngine ) {
			[[self alloc] init];
		}

		return _sharedEngine;
	}

	return nil;
}

+ (id) alloc
{
	@synchronized( [AudioEngine class] )
	{
		NSAssert( _sharedEngine == nil, @"Attempted to allocate a second instance of a singleton" );
		_sharedEngine = [super alloc];
		return _sharedEngine;
	}

	return nil;
}

- (id) init
{
	if ( (self = [super init]) ) {
		players = [[NSMutableDictionary alloc] initWithCapacity:10];
	}

	return self;
}

- (void) dealloc
{
	[players release];
	[super dealloc];
}

- (void) addSound:(NSString *)key name:(NSString *)theName ofType:(NSString *)theType delegate:(id)theDelegate loop:(BOOL)loopFlag
{
	NSString *file = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:theName ofType:theType];
	AVAudioPlayer *audioPlayer =  [[AVAudioPlayer alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:file] error:NULL];

	[audioPlayer setDelegate:theDelegate];
	[audioPlayer prepareToPlay];

	if ( loopFlag ) {
		audioPlayer.numberOfLoops = -1;
	}

	[players setObject:audioPlayer forKey:theName];

	[audioPlayer release];
}

- (AVAudioPlayer *) getPlayer:(NSString *)key
{
	return [players objectForKey:key];
}

- (void) playSoundWithKey:(NSString *)key volume:(double)gain
{
	AVAudioPlayer *player = [players objectForKey:key];
	player.volume = gain;
	[player play];
}

- (void) stopSoundWithKey:(NSString *)key
{
	AVAudioPlayer *player = [players objectForKey:key];
	[player stop];
}

- (BOOL) isSoundPlaying:(NSString *)key
{
	AVAudioPlayer *player = [players objectForKey:key];
	return [player isPlaying];
}

- (void)vibrate
{
	AudioServicesPlaySystemSound(kSystemSoundID_Vibrate);
}

@end

Posted 2 years ago #

wobster
Member
Oh yeah, dont forget to convert ALL your WAV files to CAF. I use the following:
```
> /usr/bin/afconvert -f caff -d LEI8@22050 walking.wav walking.caf
```
Good luck...
Bryan
Posted 2 years ago #
jd
Member

What is the benefit of converting to CAF?

Posted 2 years ago #
wobster
Member
It is the preferred audio format.

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/iPhone/Conceptual/iPhoneOSProgrammingGuide/AudioandVideoTechnologies/AudioandVideoTechnologies.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40007072-CH19-SW3

From the above link:

Preferred Audio Formats in iPhone OS
For uncompressed (highest quality) audio, use 16-bit, little endian, linear PCM audio data packaged in a CAF file. You can convert an audio file to this format in Mac OS X using the afconvert command-line tool, as shown here:
```
/usr/bin/afconvert -f caff -d LEI16 {INPUT} {OUTPUT}
```
The afconvert tool lets you convert to a wide range of audio data formats and file types. See the afconvert man page, and enter afconvert -h at a shell prompt, for more information.

For compressed audio when playing one sound at a time, and when you don’t need to play audio simultaneously with the iPod application, use the AAC format packaged in a CAF or m4a file.

For less memory usage when you need to play multiple sounds simultaneously, use IMA4 (IMA/ADPCM) compression. This reduces file size but entails minimal CPU impact during decompression. As with linear PCM data, package IMA4 data in a CAF file.
Posted 2 years ago #
Steve Oldmeadow
Administrator

@anothercastleneil - can you give details of the devices and the OS version you are using. I find it hard to believe it is something hardware specific, it is more likely dependent on the OS. Can you also post your code, particularly where you load sounds and any mods you have made to the SimpleAudioEngine code (if any).

@CocosDenshion users - please ignore wobster's advice of converting wave files to CAF, particularly if you want looping sounds. CocosDenshion differentiates wave files by the file extension and uses a different file loading strategy for them which results in better looping.

Posted 2 years ago #
wobster
Member

@Steve - not advice, just a suggestion to investigate AVFoundation and quoting Apples own documentation.

Posted 2 years ago #
Steve Oldmeadow
Administrator

@wobster - the problem with the Apple documentation is they don't explain why they prefer using a CAF file. When you use OpenAL there is no difference between a 16 bit little endian wave file and a 16 bit little endian CAF file. The only reason I can see that Apple prefer CAF is because it is their format versus wave which is Microsoft's format.

Also, you are wrong about AVAudioPlayer only being available in 3.1. AVAudioPlayer has been around since 2.2 and is used in CocosDenshion for playing background music.

Posted 2 years ago #
anothercastleneil
Member

Sorry for the late reply, we must be in a different time zone.

@Steve Oldmeadow - We're running on 3.1.2 on both devices, that's why it's hard not to narrow it down the the iPhones hardware. All other apps seem to run fine on the iPhone though. We're just using [SimpleAudioEngine sharedEngine] for all our sound needs (playEffect, preloadEffect, unloadEffect, playBackgroundMusic, stopBackgroundMusic), and haven't made any changes to any of the code.

@Wobster - We're going to try AudioEngine.h/AudioEngine.m today and see if the same issues occur and we'll get back to you. We didn't use that convert line you gave, we used "afconvert -v -f 'caff' -d aac -s 1 -b 19200 tree_throw.wav tree_throw.caf". Is this a problem?

Edit: Forgot to mention some information on our sounds. We converted all of our wavs to cafs, the sound filesizes are all around 10-30KB and the background music is around 250KB.

Thanks for all the replies!

Posted 2 years ago #
Steve Oldmeadow
Administrator

@anothercastleneil - what type of iPhone? I just tested CocosDenshion with 3.1.2 on a 3GS today and couldn't find any issue.

Also try running the CocosDenshion demo and see what the memory usage is like on the problematic device.

What do you do with your sounds every level? For example you have unloadEffect listed - why do you use that? Are you unloading and reloading sounds every level?

Posted 2 years ago #
Steve Oldmeadow
Administrator

@anothercastleneil - also make sure you never call dealloc on the shared SimpleAudioEngine instance and also make sure that if you had any sound code in an onEnter or onExit method that the super version of onEnter or onExit was getting called.

Also how are you detecting the 2Mb leak? Can you not just use Instruments to find out where the memory allocation is coming from?

Posted 2 years ago #
Steve Oldmeadow
Administrator

@anothercastleneil - has this been resolved?

Posted 2 years ago #
anothercastleneil
Member

@Steve
Sorry for the very late reply, we were collecting more information and got a little side tracked.

We haven't tried the CococsDenshion demo, where can this be found?

We're unloading/reloading all of our sounds every level and are calling the super version of onEnter and onExit. We're trying instruments but the game is crashing while it's running and we don't know why.

Here's some information on what devices we have been using since my last post:

#1: iPod Touch 2nd generation OS 3.1.2 - no leak
#2: iPhone 3G 2nd generation OS 3.1.2 - 2MB leak
#3: iPhone 1st generation OS 3.0 - no leak
#4: iPhone 3G 2nd generation OS 3.0 - 2MB leak

Again, when we take all sounds out of the game there are no leaks on device # 2 and 4. It's interesting that both 3G 2nd generations have similar results, maybe the CocosDenshion demo will shed some more light on this.

Thanks!

Posted 2 years ago #
Steve Oldmeadow
Administrator

@anothercastleneil - the CocosDenshion demo ships with cocos2d, it is called CocosDenshionDemo.

Why do you reload all the sounds every level? If there is a memory leak my guess is it will be in the file loading routines.

I would still really like to see some code.

Posted 2 years ago #
anothercastleneil
Member

We restored the #3 iPhone to factory settings, reinstalled all the apps and everything seems to be stable at this point.

As for code, since everything is working I have no idea what to send you since there's so many parts to it.

We'll cross our fingers and hope this problem doesn't come up again. Thanks for all the help you provided.

Posted 2 years ago #

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