This all worked great. I now have the unBrix demo running at 60FPS -
smooth as silk (almost, there are a very few small hiccups, nothing like
in the previous demo - I have one last optimization left that I think
will clean that up).
The things I did were to make sure GPU acceleration is working (the
bricks were red previously) - and preallocating (instantiating and
storing) any and all objects I might need, and removing reliance on
build in black box methods like hitTextObject. Actually, I separated the
entire game engine into simpler shape objects (x, y, width, height - all
int - final classes, no getter/setter, no inheritance) and did all the
hit testing movement calculation manually on those, then apply that to
scene in the render phase of ENTER_FRAME. I'll try moving it to RENDER
event and see if that yields any improvement too (which'll be hard to
spot!).
Doing all that preallocation jives with what is mentioned in the
packager for iphone dev guide PDF:
http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/packagerforiphone/packagerforiphone_devguide.pdf
In particular: "Allocating fresh blocks of memory is costly. It can slow
down your application or cause performance to lag during animation or
interaction as the garbage collection gets triggered."
and: "As memory fills up, iPhone OS notifies other running, native
iPhone applications to free up memory. As these applications process
this notification and work to free memory, they may compete with your
application for CPU cycles. This can momentarily degrade the performance
of your application."
For me, memory allocation has been the biggest cause for stuttering and
visual "lag" in Flash on iPhone.
I haven't posted the results yet, because I only finished this work at
3am. ;-) Also, certain properties like cacheAsBitmapMatrix aren't
available in the Player swf builds (to run on Android or Frash) so I'm
not certain a posted swf would truly represent these improvements (I'll
try it anyway though). Hopefully I can finish and polish something
within a few weeks or months and get it into the app store! :-D
Kevin N.
On 9/21/10 5:07 PM, Kevin Newman wrote:
I've been attempting to tackle the same issues, and would love a lot
more info, if there is any available, on how to get the framerates to
be stable.
I've actually had a bit of luck, and I'm currently operating on the
theory that the problem lies with memory allocation/deallocation and
the garbage collector. This seems to apply to any situation where the
player might create objects that will have to be collected - including
events (the event object - passed on dispatch), and maybe even
functions in general (args array?) - and certain built in methods like
hitTestObject, or txtFld.htmlText. Constructors are a killer.
I'm in the process of refactoring this:
http://www.unfocus.com/unBrix.html to aggressively remove all reliance
on black box APIs (like hitTestObject) and create 0 (zero) new objects
per frame, except the two event objects (ENTER_FRAME and possibly
RENDER) and touch/mouse events.
I should be done with that tonight, and then I'll have a better idea
of what kind of impact that has if any on the performance, and most
importantly on the lag spikes (for lack of a better term).
In general, I'll also note that Frash (the hacked Android player on
iOS) works far better in terms of scripting than the iPhone compiler -
I hope the recent changes in Apple's ToS means that Adobe can just
ship AVM2 and skip all this AOT compilation, since AVM2 from what I
can tell, performs better anyway (it should help make the compile
times bearable too).
From what I'm seeing, the scripting has a definite impact on
performance, much more than the folks at Adobe are letting on (maybe
they aren't aware?).
Kevin N.
On 9/21/10 9:19 AM, Tom Gooding wrote:
Hi Flashcoders (back to Apple again),
I'm wondering, having seen reports that developers are getting CS5
packager content approved on the app store, if anyone knows of a
decent Flash game / app on iPhone?
I have just read this thread on Adobe labs:
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/718595?tstart=0
Whilst there's some regrettable bickering to wade through - the
overall impression I take from it, is that decent visual performance,
say 30fps, (even when optimising for gpu according to the
guidelines) isn't possible. I'm considering whether to dedicate some
resources to our own benchmarking of it, but currently, I get the
impression it's not worth it if you want stuff that runs well / is
comparable to the native platform.
Can anyone point me in the direction of something that makes a
genuine case for Flash on iPhone before we dump it in favour of
Unity3D?!
Thanks!
Tom
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