A fast, easy to use, free, and community supported 2D game engine
I made some changes in my Sprites. I'm measuring the fps to check if performance gets better or worse but I always get 60fps with or without the change (I know this is a limitation of the iphone).60fps is good enough but I'm planning to create more complicated levels in the future so I really need to know wether there has been an improvement or not.
Is there any other way to tell?
In your app delegate, change this line:
[[CCDirector sharedDirector] setAnimationInterval:1.0/60];
Agreed, don't optimize your rough draft. Optimization is for when the game is finished. Unless you are new to cocos and are just trying to learn best practices before you build out your game model.
Here's an alternative way to test pieces of code. Uses NSTimeInterval.
You could also use the new profiling stuff in 0.99.2
See the docs..
http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/wiki/doku.php/release_notes:0_99_2
Thanks for the answers.
I'm going to try to explain my problem, it's very hard to me to write in English (I'm Spanish) .
I have a big spritesheet with plants, but in each level I only use one or two, so i think it will be better to have each plant in a different small file. If i test it with my current levels there are no performance changes apparently, because it runs always at 60fps. But for example, let's think the game (without the 60 fps iphone limitation) would run at 120 fps and with my new changes at 60 fps, i wouldn't notice the different because i always see 60 fps.
I think NSTimerInterval or CCProfilingTimer won't solve my problem because i don't want to test how fast is a peace of code in terms of CPU but the improvement of fps because of the change in my textures (maybe now opengl has to do more swaps with my textures o maybe now there are smaller textures and runs better).
Maybe if i use [[CCDirector sharedDirector] setAnimationInterval:1.0/120]; and check the delta is a solution but i don't know how to do it in an easy way (without using NSLog that affects the performance).
gaminghorror
Member
The iPhone screen is locked at 60 fps. You can't get more than 60 fps for a technical reason. Performance measuring on the Simulator is pointless.
Instead, try to do what you do n times until your performance drops below 60 fps. Then compare the fps with the different approaches you have.
I'm 99.9% sure that what you're trying to performance-test is really a waste of time. Without testing i can tell you that you will hardly notice any difference. If all you need is 1-2 plants per level there's no point having them in a spritesheet respectively a TextureAtlas. That will only add unnecessary steps to your development process so you're better of with using spriteWithFile if only to make it easier to develop.
Rule #1 of software development: Don't optimize until you have a bottleneck.
Rule #2 of software development: Make sure it actually IS a bottleneck before optimizing.
You'll waste FAR more time pre-optimizing than you ever would refactoring to solve bottlenecks later in development, and you're also far more likely to introduce brittleness to your design (which makes refactoring harder in the long run).
gaminghorror
Member
I agree with Karl here. I often wonder if this or that would be faster if i did it differently. But i force myself to stick with a decision and only optimize at the end. Most of the time i'm surprised that it's either sufficiently fast enough, or if i have to optimize the optimization is rather straightforward and just takes an hour or two.
Not sure what you mean. By changing the 60 value in this line, you can adjust the frame rate. However, like gaminghorror said, on the device you won't be able to get it above 60.
[[CCDirector sharedDirector] setAnimationInterval:1.0/60];
The code I posted about NSTimeInterval is for testing how long something takes to execute. It can be used for finding bottlenecks.
As @gaminghorror said, run it n times until you see a performance drop. Then compare it with your other method. Be sure to report back with your findings.
Sorry, I don't have any experience with chipmunk yet.
@max9xs perhaps you are getting confused by the name, AnimationInterval is how fast cocos draws things to the screen (not necessarily anything having to do with "animation"); The default animation interval is 1.0/60.0.
Regarding chipmunk performance tho..... setting the framerate lower and thus the animation interval higher (such as 1.0/50.0) actually seems to get better performance because you're giving more time to the physics and less to the drawing.
You must log in to post.
