I'm not quite sure what the best way to send the app around is. Also
the app performs significantly better on iPhone than the swf does on
Android (the swf even performs better on iPhone with Frash) so looking
at the swf in the browser will not get you 60FPS. Here it is though:
http://www.unfocus.com/unBrix.refac.html
The alpha transitions really hurt the software version (non-iPhone/AIR).
If anyone has any suggestions about how to share the ipa... I'd be happy
to send a fake-signed copy around.
Notes: This performs at 59.1FPS on iPhone, ~52FPS in Frash/iOS 3GS -
~32 on Droid 2, and only ~45FPS in Firefox on Mac OS X (60FPS solid in
Safari and Chrome)!!
I haven't tested Android AIR yet (I suspect it'll be similar to iPhone
because of cacheAsBitmapMatrix).
Kevin N.
On 9/22/10 1:17 PM, Tom Gooding wrote:
Yes, I'd love to see this too, thanks for keeping us updated Kevin, nice one
Tom
On 22 Sep 2010, at 18:07, jared stanley wrote:
wow 60 fps sounds impressive! i have not been impressed with the
flash>iphone demos adobe has been showcasing; they showcased the same blox
game when they first announced it and again 6 months later just before
release...i would love to see your example as it would be the first
smooth-running demo i've seen.
On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 9:29 AM, Kevin Newman<[email protected]> wrote:
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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