How to keep touch animation smooth.

cocos2d for iPhone » Programming » cocos2d support (graphics engine)

How to keep touch animation smooth.

(13 posts) (7 voices)

Started 2 years ago by carlosh
Latest reply from pixluser

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carlosh
Member

I don't even know if I should post this here, but maybe someone can shed some light on this issue.

So in my game I have like 30 or 40 sprites, and each have an action. My game is steady at 60fps at the beginning, when I only have the base sprites, like 7, and when the user points with his finger and aims in the screen, the aiming animation is very smooth. I capture the movement in the ccTouchesMoved callback.

When I have from 20 to 30 sprites, my fps lowers to 25-30, the actions looks fine, and the game looks to run fine, with some hiccup, but what feels horrible is the movement of the aim, the animation is very slow, I touch and move the aim on the screen, and it just moves sloooow. But it is playable, and I can start killing the sprites, and when I am again with the base sprites, 7, everything gets smooth. My fps goes back to 60 again, and touching and moving the aim feels smooth. I have check for leaks, and apparently I don't have, my object allocations looks good, but what really looks bad is the CPU usage. Basically my game is using 100% of the CPU when I am experiencing the 25-30fps.

Here an image taking from the core animation template in Instruments.

Maybe I am not understanding the information here, but it appears as if 33.3% is used by the call to RunWebThread(void*). I have OpenFeint disabled, and have also disabled the actions, so basically the sprites are there but without animations, and I have the same issue. The sample always looks the same, with this call taking that percentage of usage.

Also, on the ccTouchesMoved callback, what I do is basically I calculate some values, nothing fancy, just checking some constraints, with the position I get from the callback, and reposition a sprite(the aim) using the setPosition message. I only have 2 layers, one is the hud, and the other one is the game, which contains all the spritesheets, and some sprites.

Any help will be appreciated. Thanks.

Posted 2 years ago #
adpro
Member

A few things to look at....

Are you using AtlasSprites?

Are you using any Labels? Make sure you use LabelAtlas

Check your loops and your schedules. Make them as small as you can.... the logic I mean.

In my first game, I experienced some crazy drops, cause I was always checking for collisions and stuff. My loops were going through too often. I combined a lot of them to check for things happening and it fixed a lot of the lag issues. My Labels were also causing a lot of headaches, and when I changed them to LabelAtlases, that helped a lot.

Also, animations and actions need to be dealt with properly. I always make objects that flag when actions can be removed, and I remove them in my main schedules when they need to be removed, especially when using some sort of physics engine. Actions are expensive in my experiences, so make sure you are getting rid of them when you can.

Other than that, just make sure youa re getting rid of anything in memory that you don't need.

I find it's best to get your game working the way you want it, then fine tune it after to max out your fps.

Posted 2 years ago #
carlosh
Member

Yes I am using AtlasSprite. And my labels are CCBitmapFontAtlas. I will check my loops and see if I found anything that I can optimize. Thanks.

Posted 2 years ago #
abitofcode
Moderator

Try altering the CGRectMake in your atlas sprite construction to use a smaller width and height e.g CGRectMake(currentvalueX, currentvalueY, 64, 64) this should enable you to quickly determine whether it is the size of your sprites rather than the number that is causing the slowdown.

Do you have any audio playing? If you have any collision detection running consider eliminating any fine checking on objects that are too far away.

Posted 2 years ago #
carlosh
Member

Yes I have audio playing, but even after eliminating the sound for testing, the slowdown persists. In my sprites, what I do, when I create the SpriteSheet, I create each of the animations I will need, then I set the display frame to the sprite, and I think what that internally does is it sets the right size, because when I check the content size, it is of the size of each of my frames.

I do have collision detection, and I forgot that it is called very often, I will check that. Thanks.

Posted 2 years ago #

abitofcode
Moderator

If your objects fit neatly into circles you can simplify your collision using something along these lines;

#define MYRADIUS 30

-(BOOL)isCollision:(CGPoint)pos1 targetPos:(CGPoint)pos2 targetRadius:(int)radius
{
	double dx = pos1.x - pos2.x;
	double dy = pos1.y - pos2.y;
        // you could check here if dx or dy are greater than
        // MYRADIUS + the largest target radius then return NO
        // and avoid the next calculation

	double dist = sqrt(dx*dx+dy*dy);
	if(dist < (MYRADIUS + radius)){
		return YES;
	}
	return NO;
}

edit: oops, fixed a couple of errors

Posted 2 years ago #

carlosh
Member

Thanks for the code. I check my collisions, and the code is efficient enough, when all the objects or sprites are on the surface, no collision are generated. Every object just make 2 contacts, so this is not taking much or any cpu. I will have to check something else.

Posted 2 years ago #
georgeburns
Member

are you using chipmunk?

Posted 2 years ago #
carlosh
Member

Box2D

Posted 2 years ago #
carlosh
Member

Doing some more tests, I changed the CCDirector director type. I was using CCDirectorTypeDisplayLink, and I changed it to CCDirectorTypeNSTimer, and now, when I have all the sprites running, the fps is steady at 30, but the aim animation is still smooth, so the game is responsive and feels right.

Which directory type is the best? I was using DisplayLink since it says in the documentation that is the recommended one if you are using the SDK 3.1>, which is my case.

Posted 2 years ago #
CJ
Moderator

I'm really curious about the RunWebThread thing. I also see this in my instruments using cpu, but I haven't put ANY net code in my app. I tried searching google and came up empty.

Posted 2 years ago #
surreal
Member

carlosh -

We have the same issue. We are currently using cocos2d 0.99final. We noticed that when we upgraded all our devices from 3.1.2 to 3.1.3, this issue became apparent ONLY on the original iPhone and 3G but the 3GS model did not display this behavior (touches still smooth).

We are using CCDirectorTypeDisplayLink, but switched to CCDirectorTypeNSTimer to resolve the issue. All other directors displayed the unsmooth touch behavior on the older devices.

From our point of view, the upgrade from the sdk 3.1.2 to 3.1.3 broke smooth touches on the older models? Any insight here?

Posted 1 year ago #
pixluser
Member

We have the same problem here onto an iphone V1... but the switching : CCDirectorTypeDisplayLink to CCDirectorTypeNSTimer didn't resolve our issues.. we still continue to see the RunWebThread(void*) taking 25% of our speed...

some ideas ? some update to this thread ??

Thanks'

Posted 1 year ago #

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