I am developing a ipad game using flash CS5. When I run it in flash or web browser, it run quite smoothly but when I published it into ipa file and run it on my own ipad, it became very very slow. Since my game has many stages and characters, the amount of symbols may up to more than 50. That makes the flash file more than 100mb (but the ipa is only 11mb) All of the symbols are exported in frame 1.
Therefore, I have some questions wish to understand:
1)if I used preloader and exports the symbols in frame 2, will my game run more smoothly? is one preloader when the game is loaded enough? or it is need for every game scenes?
2)Is there any other technique that a big game developed in Flash has to follow in order can be run in low configurations devices?
3)Why many other big game can run so smoothly although it contains a lot more characters and background than mine?
Thank you a lot for your help ^^
1) All the preloader will do is show your users that something is going on until the game starts. It will not affect game performance.
2) Yes: You have to optimize every calculation and every asset for small memory footprint and fast performance. Start here.
3) Because they spent a lot of time on 2)
On a side note: It is usually a good idea to have a main game loop, and do all the calculations in your game logic prior to a single rendering step, instead of having lots of independent timelines. In the rendering step, you can exclude and/or minimize all the efforts on objects that are out of sight, or not entirely visible.
A few things to keep in mind:
Upgrade to Flash CS5.5
Use flashplayer 11.0
Use AIR3.1 SDK
Publish using "GPU" (not CPU)
Object pooling!
Try using as much bitmaps as possible, vectors are "heavier".
'cacheAsBitmap' only on objects that move along the x / y axes
Alpha transparencies eat up your CPU
Did I mention Object pooling?
Attach a FPS monitor to your app, so you can keep track of frame-rate drops.
Do yourself a favour and ditch Flash. Write your game in Objective C / C / C++
Even Adobe and Microsoft are abandoning Flash for Mobile devices.
Btw, I'm no Flash hater - I've been a "Flash developer" since FutureSplash and still use the Flash IDE where appropriate, but not when targeting mobile devices.
Related
I am developping my first application on iOS. I am on this language since few days and I am going to share this application in Apple Store ASAP. But I have a big question around architecture.
Currently, I have with about 40 different type of Views, others components and a lot of PNG (30x30). I know that I can reduce considerably the number of Views through the development of a small framework but as it's my first learning-by-practice application, I wanted to move on quickly about all standards components and to start this development without architecture, reusables class or design pattern ... without think too hard.
To be short, I am wondering about the real size of applications in production and the performances. Have we got some constraints with:
Apple Store (upload apps)
Ram Capacity of iPhone during using
Download application from apple store for the user
etc...
Basicly, is it acceptable to have with about 40 screens for an iPhone Application?
Best regards.
There is a limit of 50 MB for over-the-air downloads.
Number of screens is probably not going to be a problem. The amount of executable code associated with each screen is probably not going to be significant. The bigger issue is how much PNG data you are going to have embedded in the app. A single 30x30 PNG isn't very big. 40 of them probably won't very big (depending on how well they compress). But if you have dozens of them per screen, or if you have a big hi-res background image for each screen, then the total amount of data could get big.
My advice would be to just start developing everything in the most straightforward way you can. Don't worry about sizes until you have some evidence that it may be a problem. And do a lot of testing on an actual device (don't rely on the Simulator) running whatever the oldest OS version is that you are willing to support.
I'm building an app for iOS with Adobe Flex builder and compiling it into an .ipa using Adobe's tools.
Through initial testing, I see that the end result isn't as rich as native code, nor is it as fast or smooth.
Without simply saying 'why dont you just use objective-c', are there any documentation as to the overhead to building an app this way?
Specifically, what kind of performance hit can you expect when using Adobe's platform instead?
Make sure you are using the latest AIR 3.0 SDK for iOS packaging. It is notably higher performance.
Consider best practices when developing your app:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/optimize_content_ios.html
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/as3/mobile/flashplatform_optimizing_content.pdf
http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/files/presentations/fitc_amsterdam_2010/flash_iphone_fitc_2010.pdf
Blanket comparisons to native Objective-C is a wide topic, to which capability of Flash ubiquitous deployment to multiple platforms should also be considered if you're targeting Android and BlackBerry.
Perhaps citing specific issues of your implementation would help yield insight.
I too have been developing a Flash-based iOS app. My initial prototype was useless in an iPad 1. I had to look for ways to optimize. My second prototype is performing quite well. So here are some pointers.
1) Don't use timers. I had to write my own utility "FrameWorker" Singleton class to manage and delegate all my animations, or even delayed actions to a single enterFrame event. This alone will give you a huge speed boost.
2) Don't use many enterFrame events on different objects. As I said on point one, find a way to use a single enterFrame that you can add and remove processes to.
3) Avoid vectors as much as possible-use images. If you need to draw objects in the Flash IDE or via action script, use cacheAsBitmap = true.
4) Don't use visual objects that are much larger than the screen area. If you need to use large objects across the screen, then manage them off the display list and learn blitting techniques to draw to the screen ONLY the rect that will be display at that time. Lee Brimlow has a couple of good starter tutorials.
5) Be very disciplined about managing events. Make sure you always remove listeners that are not necessary anymore for instance.
6) Distribute your app's load to different frames. Don't do too many intensive things on a single frame.
If you follow these pointers your app will be as fast as any out there.
I am making an app that uses a lot of fairly big image files. I notice it crashes when they all get loaded on my iPhone 3G (128 mb ram), but not when I test it on a 3rd gen iPod (256 mb ram). So I assume there must be some percentage that is allowed for each app to use? My app has about 30 images at about 440k each loaded so 13.2mb. I didn't think that would be too much. They need to be swapped in and out pretty quickly, so releasing the ones not in use from memory doesn't seem like a good idea...
EDIT:
The app swaps images based on the way the phone is being tilted. It's 30 images from a 3D scene, so when you move it, it changes the perspective. It needs to be as smooth as possible.
The answer is: as much as you want, until the OS complains.
There is no such thing as an absolute memory limit, since it wholly depends on the phone's memory, how much the OS and its related services are taking up, and the time of the month (just kidding, but you get the idea).
You should be scaling down these large image files to fit into memory, or even more so, not loading them all at once considering the screen is so small and only so much can be viewed at any one particular time.
Following iPad's announcement and its SDK (iPhone SDK 3.2), porting apps to iPad becomes an important issue. What guidelines I should follow in my iPhone apps to ensure I can port it to iPad as seamlessly as possible?
The different resolution is particularly an important issue. While the iPad runs iPhone apps unmodified, it's not really the desirable behavior for a native app. How can we make our iPhone apps resolution-independent so that they can run gracefully on all resolutions like most desktop apps?
If you've been using IB and setting the resize behaviors of elements properly, and also coding frame coordinates all relative to each other you are half-way to having a UI that can potentially scale to a larger screen.
From the screen shots there are new kinds of action-sheets as well, potentially attached to UI elements instead of floating - if you use overlays today they will probably work about the same but you may want to consider changing placement from the center on larger display.
UPDATE:
Now the event is over, and registered developers can download the SDK - although we cannot talk about specific features here just yet, read through ALL of the documents related to the new OS version as there are a number of things aimed at helping you transition to supporting both platforms. Also before you start using custom libraries for things take a look through the API changes to see what new abilities might be supported that are not today.
Generally speaking, what I said above about IB holds true, and also you should start thinking about how your apps today could use more space to present more information at once instead of being split out over multiple screens. Also if you are doing any projects right now that use images, make sure to initially design the images large enough that you can also use them for higher resolution tablet applications.
It is far more reasonable to expect users to input text (and larger amounts of it) than with a non-iPad device.
Nothing, it appears. Although we don't have the SDK quite yet. It will all existing run iPhone app without an issue, albeit at reduced resolution.
It remains to be seen how much of the existing iPhone SDK is shared with the iPad SDK UI wise.
Judging by what has been said, absolutely nothing. You will have to adapt to the new screen size and better hardware all together, if you want to take advantage of the features that the improved device offers. The lack of a 3g module is also something to consider if your app(s) rely on that functionality.
Something I've noticed about every iPhone app I've tried is that they all have places where they seem very slow and unresponsive. It's true of the games, the free apps, the pricy, popular, "professional" apps, and even a couple of Apple's built-in apps. They all seem to have places where they take many seconds or even a minute to respond to screen touches; bog down and show a spinning beachball for seconds at a time; "queue up" input so that a button press appears to ignored only to actually do something ten seconds later like a poorly made DVR; and lock up for so long that the OS watchdog just kills them.
Because these perf issues are so widespread it seems to me that there must be some common performance pitfalls some system gotchas that are coming up over and over again for lots of different people. I'm not an iPhone developer myself, so I'm canvassing the community's opinions:
What are the most common performance mistakes on the iPhone?
Or, what human factors of iPhone development make it too easy to ship with poor performance?
I think that the performance issues are a matter of perception. Apple has employed animation throughout every aspect of the iPhone's interface, which produces the impression of a smooth, responsive device. The slowdowns you refer to appear much worse than they might be because they stand out from the otherwise fluid interface. If you compare the total execution times of these tasks to similar applications on other mobile devices, I'd guess that the iPhone implementations would still come out near the top.
There's always room for improvement, though, and I'd expect that many of the tricks people have learned in the last year will lead to faster, more responsive applications. Even the development tools themselves are advancing, and that should make it easier to diagnose and deal with performance bottleneck. I know I keep learning new tricks every week for squeezing a little more out of the CPU, GPU, or onboard memory.
I'm still surprised by how quickly people have shifted their expectations as to what handheld devices can do. I'm the author of an open source application called Molecules, which does 3-D molecular modeling on the iPhone. A little over ten years ago, these types of renderings were being done on dedicated SGI Irix workstations. A few weeks after the launch of the App Store, I started receiving emails from people complaining that the application was a little jerky when they tried to manipulate molecules with over 20,000 atoms in their structure. In a very short time, people went from treating these devices like phones and music players to viewing them as portable computers.
Memory management is a bit of a beast.
But I think the biggest problem is this: How long can you afford to polish a product that will sell for 99 cents and compete with tens of thousands of other apps and has unknown revenue potential in a rapidly changing market?
The iPhone is a GREAT little device, but the competition for mindshare is fierce and expensive.
As mentioned before the ratio of profit/time spent in development would explain it.
More technically, I would say that the lag you see is created on startup when apps are either getting data over network or calling home to check for updates and so on. Additionaly it may be created with initializing application like loading large amounts of data from database/files, loading gui components and images, drawing and so on.
Similar to memory management this all can be solved by designing operations to run in background, lazy loading and so on but that requires more time, time is money, you don't get much for 99C app which may or may not sell at all.
It is interesting that so many times it is pointed out in professional articles (no ref...) that we should not care anymore about memory and speed because desktops are getting faster with more memory. What people tend to forget is that at the same we're trying to squeeze more power from smaller and smaller devices that are running with smaller resources.
Most web pages for example are nowadays designed to load huge amounts of animations and images and, unlike some, are not tweaked at all for performance but do just okay on desktops. Those web pages have no chance of loading on mobile device. The same goes for applications, designing a fat big framework (or gui widget library) for desktop will make it ultra difficult to port the functionality to sleek mobile device be it iphone, some fruit berry and what not.
As in other things in life, you get what you paid for.
My 99C.
I think the biggest issue is that it's impossible to determine the speed of an app without actually running it on the device. Developers perform most of the basic app testing in the iPhone Simulator (which can run up to 1000x times as fast in my experience). Some operations that take a split second in the simulator might require a progress indicator on the phone, and by the time you realize, it would require a lot of effort to go back and add (and in some cases thread) the operation in question. As Noshredna pointed out, it's generally a 99c app.
The iPhone's processor is also just fundamentally limiting. I've seen several nice looking apps that try to do very impressive things without accepting the constraints of the platform.
This is sort of a side note, and I don't want to start the mobile platform wars, but I've found that iPhone Apps are generally more responsive than Android apps...
Well, because maybe you deleated the app and install again because something wrong happens to it, so it must took awhile, it took me about 2 or 3 days to get full loaded so be patient, it will come eventually. Also maybe your iphone doesn't have any more spaces for your app, or your app is quite heavy, try and delete other apps so it will have rooms.