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Per the best practice, I am reusing my actions so I don't incur the overhead of all the mallocs and deallocs.
[mySprite runAction: [Sequence actions: reusedAction1, reusedAction2, nil]];But in the console log, i can still see a lot of...
deallocing <Sequence = 03D54060 | Tag = -1>My sequence doesn't change and I would like to reuse it just like I reuse my actions. Is this possible? I've tried a few things but they usually crash pretty bad.
Tim
Member
Along the lines of this topic, I've been doing the following where I'm creating the action in init (declared beeMove in the header as an Action) and then retaining it:
beeMove = [MoveTo actionWithDuration:2 position:ccp(300,-50)];
[beeMove retain];Then I just call the action on an as needed basis.
[bee1 runAction:beeMove];I've seen the deallocations once an action is completed and assumed that this is just house keeping once the action was done. Is this this right way to retain actions for future use and will we always see the deallocs after the action is done?
thx
@Tim
There's a topic I talked about on the forums.
http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forum/topic/2701#post-16778
The TLDR version is that you can't retain actions for performance reasons the only benefit I can see is so you don't write out the action all the time.
It is possible to re-use actions, but it requires some modification to cocos2d.
I got tired of all the deallocations and reallocations so I changed the Action system somewhat.
Once you have that in place, your actions can then recalculate their durations should anything change. However, it also requires changing the implementations of some actions such as Sequence, Spawn, and MoveTo/MoveBy.
I've made my own implementations RecalculatingSequence, RecalculatingSpawn, MoveToMutable, and MoveByMutable.
The recalculating actions will pass updateDuration requests to their children, and then update their own duration with the sum of the children (or the largest duration, in the case of Spawn).
MoveToMutable and MoveByMutable allow you to change the duration or endPoint (or delta, in the case of MoveBy). I've also added pixelsPerSecond, which allows you to maintain the speed of movement when changing the endPoint or delta.
The end result is that I can retain actions for my objects (each gets its own copy, of course), use them, modify them, and know that the actions will deal with any modifications I apply at runtime. The debug window shows NO deallocs while my scene is running. In doing so, I've gained about 2-5fps (hard to measure exactly) on average in my current game (which involves up to 50 sprites moving around constantly).
If the updateDuration method gets added to mainstream cocos2d, I'll contribute my actions. They could either be added separately or the current cocos2d versions could be modified. The changes themselves aren't really that big.
In the best practices doc it directly contradicts this information:
Once the action is used, save it for later if you know you will execute that type of action again. Then, instead of allocing a new action, you can just initialize it.
Is that doc wrong? Can anyone say with certainty
I tried something else and it works for me. not sure what's the performance cost though... everything allocates and deallocates just fine, but I dont create actions per object. instead I use a copy ;)
so I have a NSMutableArray with Actions, each of the actions stored has a tag. then I search for that action using the tag and return it like this:
return [[action copy] autorelease];
so no cost of creating an action, but only copying
In the best practices doc it directly contradicts this information:
Once the action is used, save it for later if you know you will execute that type of action again. Then, instead of allocing a new action, you can just initialize it.
Is that doc wrong? Can anyone say with certainty
Can anyone comment on how to reuse actions? Otherwise, I think the best practices needs to be updated.
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