Hi all
Im having a problem with an iphone app that im working on.im using objective c and cocos2d. The frame rate just drops drastically. I have tested for leaks and allocations etc using instruments and all looks good on that front. I am not using any particles or sound at the moment so its not anything like that. its just animated sprites and swapping around of layers. I have stepped through it many times and it is going into the deallocs of each layer as appropriate as well as checking the retain counts on everything to be sure all is getting released but frame rate still drops when i swap between layers.
the log is giving me this
CCLOG(#"cocos2d: Failed to swap renderbuffer in %s\n", FUNCTION);
which is called in
-[EAGLView swapBuffers]
but i have no idea what that is or how to solve it. cpu sampler says this is taking up 77.2% of cpu time.
any ideas would be great im stumped at the moment cheers.
g
This can occur if you are still drawing to the EAGLView whilst it is being swapped out. Check where you are swapping the buffer and ensure you stop all animation before you swap and resume after.
Related
I'm having the absolute worst time with running out of memory in my game with cocos2d.
I have 4 scenes. two vanish from memory when I switch scenes using
[[CCDirector sharedDirector]replaceScene:sceneWithTransition]
I've tried push/pop and it makes the problem about 10x worse.
2 of the scenes however are like a virus. The conditions under which I can remove them from memory do not exist.
I am using the ARC alterations. I was hoping they would help, they did not.
I've overridden the cleanup method to make sure I get rid of references to everything in the scenes. The first one is the game play scene, and I can imagine how it might be possible that I've missed something that is somehow holding on to the scene. However the other one is the settings scene. It has 5 parts. they all get tossed and yet the scene will not purge. before converting to ARC the app was unusable it crashed so often and when it wasn't crashing it was running out of memory. After ARC it lasts about 4x longer than before but still runs out of memory regularly. Crashes however are almost non-existant.
I suppose first off, what is the correct way to switch between scenes?
Second, how does one remove something from memory when using arch because object = nil does nothing. All of my other programs using ARC run like dreams. None of them use the cocos2d engine. I'd not seen a memory error since the introduction of arc until I made the mistake of converting my quartz2d game in to cocos2d. The only reason I don't o back to a platform that actually functions is that I really like the effects possible in cocos that I simply cannot make work in quartz.
It seems that cocos2d had some issues with ARC that got fixed only recently.
I don't know if this has to do with your memory problems, but you might check which cocos2d version you are using.
Anyway, it seems that cocos2d will fully support ARC only from version 2.0. So, you might be better off not using ARC and getting your memory management right by properly using release. As far as I know, cocos2d has no memory problem, so you should be able to accomplish it.
push/pop from what I understand use a "stack" model thus memory is not erased when new scenes are pushed or popped, which would explain why that gets worse when using this method.
one way you can help save memory, especially during a transition, is to transition to a loading scene and then from there transition to the actual scene you want. This is because during a normal transition, both scenes occupy memory simultaneously for at least 1 frame, whereas a cheap loading scene will instead take each of their places, reducing the horrible memory spike that often occurs when transitioning between two intense scenes.
I'm working on an iPhone game that involves only two dimensional, translation-based animation of just one object. This object is subclassed from UIView and drawn with Quartz-2D. The translation is currently put into effect by an NSTimer that ticks each frame and tells the UIView to change its location.
However, there is some fairly complex math that goes behind determining where the UIView should move during the next frame. Testing the game on the iOS simulator works fine, but when testing on an iPhone it definitely seems to be skipping frames.
My question is this: is my method of translating the view frame by frame simply a bad method? I know OpenGL is more typically used for games, but it seems a shame to set up OpenGL for such a simple animation. Nonetheless, is it worth the hassle?
It's hard to say without knowing what kind of complex math is going on to calculate the translations. Using OpenGL for this only makes sense if the GPU is really the bottleneck. I would suspect that this is not the case, but you have to test which parts are causing the skipped frames.
Generally, UIView and CALayer are implemented on top of OpenGL, so animating the translation of a UIView already makes use of the GPU.
As an aside, using CADisplayLink instead of NSTimer would probably be better for a game loop.
The problem with the iPhone simulator is it has access to the same resources as your mac. Your macs ram, video card etc. What I would suggest doing is opening instruments.app that comes with the iPhone SDK, and using the CoreAnimation template to have a look at how your resources are being managed. You could also look at allocations to see if its something hogging ram. CPU could also help.
tl;dr iPhone sim uses your macs ram and GFX card. Try looking at the sequence in Instruments to see if theres some lag.
I am working on an OpenGL application for the iPhone...
My app has only 2 views:
An OpenGL view and, as a subview for the OpenGL view, a view with the sole purpose of catching touch events...
The problem is that after about 10-15 minutes of keeping the app running on the device, I get a big (0.5s-1s) delay between every touchesMoved:withEvent: call
The animation runs smooth, and CPU usage is also not the problem (10% at most)
I have no idea what might be causing this
That is weird, eh.
This happens ON THE DEVICE right? When you are not running tethered from XCode?
I would guess you are using up a lot of memory, either a leak or just in some way using up more and more memory as time goes on.
Are you familiar with the various memory tools to watch what is going on?
Also, what about this: launch a few other large apps that remain in the background. Run your app until the problem exhibits. Then, kill the other apps. Does the problem suddenly go away? If so that would suggest you're low on memory.
Would be interested to hear.
I have a game that runs fine as is (around 30fps), but fps went down the drain when I tried to implement ads. I tried Greystripe and iAds but with same result (iAds were maybe bit worse). Average fps is almost same, but there are huge spikes all the times (1-2 spikes per second) and game is unplayable.
I guess it is because ad is in another view. I read somewhere that opengl apps on iphone don't like having another views with them, but there is plenty of games with ads on app store. How do they do it?
My implementation should be ok. I did everything as documentation and samples told me. I have my opengl view and ad view as subviews in app window, adview being in front of opengl view and thus covering part of it. Could this be the problem? Is it better to make opengl view smaller to left space for ad so they don't overlap? Do you have any other ideas what could be wrong?
Lope, I've created a gist at this link with a singleton "AdManager" class I wrote to handle iAds using cocos2d. Cocos2d sits on top of OpenGL, of course, and I've found that this code doesn't affect FPS even for relatively complicated games.
You'll have to modify this a bit to work with your application, changing out the cocos2d calls, etc, but this will give you asynchronous loading of iAds, which should help the FPS issue.
To use this class, include its header and call
[[AdManager sharedManager] attachAdToView:self.view];
wherever you need iAds. The ads will remain hidden until an ad loads, at which time they'll pop up at the top of screen. (The class works for iOS 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2).
Also, I should add that I have cocos2d running inside of an overall UIViewController that I call "Cocos2DController". When I attach the ads to a cocos2d view, I'm using
[[AdManager sharedManager] attachAdToView:[[CCDirector sharedDirector] openGLView]];
Best of luck!
We can hit and miss with apple's choices, but go for the sure thing and implement the ads in other parts to be appealing and not intrusive. It will be better for the framerate, and for you.
Try downloading the ads in a seperate, low priority, thread. You can, thus, nsure that the ads loading does not take too much CPU time. With a bit of CPU synchronisation you can make sure you don't try to display the new ad until it is completely ready to display. Sure it will suck some CPU time away from what you are trying to do but set your priorities right and it should only suck time when you are busy doing nothing.
Please excuse the thread necro'ing here, but I've used Stack Overflow a lot to help me through the problems I've had during coding, and thought my experience might be useful to someone in the future.
My simple cocos2d game ran with decent FPS (rarely changed the FPS display at all) until I implemented AdWhirl (integrating AdMob + iAd only). It would then run OK for the first few iterations, but upon upon the 9th or 10th scene refresh (single screen game, time in each scene < 5 seconds on average) the FPS would dive to ~20FPS, and drop again each time the scene refreshed.
Turns out, in my n00biness (this may be particular to me :) ), I was calling the scene from within itself. That is, once the actions had finished, the last action was to call the main scene again (a lazy way of rebuilding the scene for the user to have another go). This init'd the views and view controllers I had inserted to handle the AdWhirl ads all over again, and not only did I have a memory leak, I had 10+ view controllers all trying to request and service ads from AdWhirl. Once I got a clue and took that self-referring loop out, all was good.
I've observed similar behavior in an Apple example app and a game I am working on. In the game, the behavior is eventually causing the app to crash due to running out of memory. The example app is Touches.
At any point when touches are being tracked, which is when you're moving one of the objects around in Touches, and pretty much any time a touch is down in my game, memory usage goes up steadily, for as long as you continue moving the touch around. Once the touch sequence completes, the memory usage does not go back down. I've gotten Touches, which starts off using less than half a meg, up to about 4MB net allocations with a few minutes playing around. That memory is never deallocated.
So my question is: why does this memory never get deallocated? Am I fundamentally misunderstanding something? Is this a framework flaw? I've read some about issues with the accelerometer and touches leaking, but I'm not using the accelerometer at all in this game.
I apologize if this seems TOO elementary, but...
There's no chance you have NSZombiesEnabled set to YES, do you?
That would prevent the deallocation of any objects whatsoever, and if you did allocate new ones, then EVENTUALLY the app will run out of memory.
Use instruments to find what instances are not being deallocated. I had a similar problem, and all it came down to was that I was calling retain, but not release (due to a logic error).
Im in a very similar situation. In fact, if i just let me app run without touching anything (all it does is run an NSTimer to update the display). And i notice the memory slowly but steadily increasing in usage.
If there are memory leaks its not obvious. Because ive seen memory leaks popup whenever it detects one.
So does that mean there are undetectable memory leaks?