I have started working on a new Xcode project, a game to be exact. Now, i will be adding what you might call sprites to the screen quite frequently, and the image that represents them will be either of a total of 3. Now, when i start adding these images programmatically to the viewcontrollers view, the app will start lagging as i reach a still fairly low number compared to many other games out there (maybe 5-10). Now, i was wondering if it had to do with caching? i see you can cache images in Cocos2d which i just started learning, to reduce the processing time of rendering the images on-screen. How do i come about this in Xcode?
IN SHORT: How do i "cache" or allow Xcode to rapidly draw images to prevent lag when drawing multiple images?
Thanks on advance.
JBJ
Xcode is the IDE and development environment, it's not the operating system, which is where any caching would really be happening.
UIImage does do some kind of caching (here is a related question that talks about this) but if you're going to be using cocos2d, you should rely more upon whatever your game framework provides versus what the O.S> provides.
You should rely on a proper API (like cocos2d, since you are talking about it) to develop games, not on UIKit classes which are not meant to be used in this way.. why should caching be supported in something that is used for layouts and interfaces and not for realtime rendering?
I agree with Jack that you should probably just use Cocos2D. But if you want to do it yourself, you should use the imageNamed: method of UIImage to load the images, because it takes care of caching automatically, and you should use UIImageView to display the images, because Apple has put a lot of effort into optimizing UIImageView.
Related
Does soneone of you have a good solution for external rendering for Microsoft HoloLens Apps? Specified: Is it possible to let my laptop render an amount of 3D objects that is too much for the HoloLens GPU and then display them with the HoloLens by wifi including the spatial mapping and interaction?
It's possible to render remotely both directly from the unity editor and from a built application.
While neither achieves your goal of a "good solution" they both allow very intensive applications to at least run at all.
This walks you through how to add it to an app you're building.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-reality/add-holographic-remoting
This is for running directly from the editor:
https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/05/30/create-enhanced-3d-visuals-with-holographic-emulation-in-uwp/
I don't think this is possible since, you can't really access the OS or the processor at all on the HoloLens. Even if you do manage to send the data to a 3rd party to process, the data will still need to be run back through the HoloLens which is really just the same as before.
You may find a way to perhaps hook up a VR backpack to it but even then, I highly doubt it would be possible.
If you are having trouble rendering 3D objects, then you should reduce the number of triangles, get a lower resolution shader on it, or reduce the size of the object. The biggest factor in processing 3D objects on the HoloLens is how much space is being drawn on the lens. If your object takes up 25% of the view instead of 100% it will be easier to process on the HoloLens.
Also if you can't avoid a lot of objects in the scene maybe check out LOD, which reduces the resolution of objects based off of distance to it and vice versa.
I'm trying to port an android/iOS game to windows phone 8(cocos2dx v 2.2). I'm using the exact same code base that I've used for android and iOS. The game functions just fine, but I facing some major FPS drop. The game runs flawlessly at 60FPS in android and iOS, but I'm getting roughly about 35FPS on wp8. Has this got to do anything with differences in OpenGL and directX?
I doubt its got to do with the game's logic and calculations because when the game starts in windows phone, it starts with 60FPS on the main menu, which has got like 5 sprites. But as I add more sprites on the screen, say about 30 of them(average number of sprites when I'm IN the game) the FPS rapidly drops to 35-40 range. Note that there are no schedulers or update functions running at this point. I did the same test on Android, but the FPS didn't drop. Does the win8 port of cocos2dx suck?
Any help,comments or redirection to useful articles would be appreciated.
Thank you.
In case anyone runs into similar issue, I reduced the number of children in the scene and deployed the build in release mode. Gave a major boost to the FPS. Also, I had a bunch of float to string and int to string conversions happening in every frame inside the update function. That was eating away on the processing speed too.
Actually, the Cocos2dx port for WP8 is ok, but outdated. Cocos2d-x is now at 3.0 beta, but the WP8 was left at 2.0 alpha.
Anyway... in Cocos there are some recursive drawing functions which are very heavy on the CPU, and also, keep in mind that even though WP8 is supposed tu support arrays, lists, maps etc. they are very slow on WP8.
And since you came to this subject, Please let me know if you managed to successfully put cocos2d-x on an XAML+D3D Interop project. I am getting tons of crashes.
EDIT: Indeed, the recursive calls which process (draw or update) child "CCNode"s are very heavy on the device. However, after putting Cocos2d-x ver. 2.0alpha for WP8 into a XAML+D3D interop project, I found a whole lot of memory related issues. Apparently, after doing this (or just because I don't know how to properly configure my VS project and allow loose addressing), a lot of uninitialized pointers and data cause some memory overlaps, leading to major crashes.
This proves only that it was truely an alpha release :) Too bad no newer version of Cocos2d-x for Wp8 is available.
I'm am an experienced flash developer who's been learning objective-c for the last 5 months.
I am beginning the development of an app previously prototyped in Flash and I'm trying to guess what could be the best approach to port it to iOS.
My app is kind of a music game. It consists of some dynamic graphics (circles growing and rotating), with typography also changing and rotating. Everything moves in sync with music. And at the same time the user can interact with the app (moving and rotating things) and some sounds will change depending on his actions.
Graphics can't be bitmaps because they get redrawn every frame.
This was easy to develop with Flash due to its management of vector graphics. But I'm not sure what would be the best way to do it in objective-c.
My options, I guess are things like: Core Graphics, OpenGL, maybe Cocos2D (not sure if that would be to kill a flea with a sledgehammer). Or even things like OpenFrameworks or Cinder, but I rather use objective-c other than c++.
Any hint on where to look at will be appreciated.
EDIT:
I can't really put a real screenshot due to confidentiality issues. But it is something similar to this
But it will be interactive and sections would change size and disappear depending on the music and user interaction.
Which graphics library should you use? The answer is going to depend a lot on what you know or could learn. OpenGL will use hardware acceleration, so it's probably fastest. But OpenGL doesn't have built-in functions for drawing arc segments or any curves or text at all, so you'd probably have to do it yourself. Also, OpenGL is notoriously difficult to learn.
Core Graphics has many cool methods for drawing vector graphics (rectangles, arcs, general paths, etc.), but might be slower than you want, depending on what you're trying to do. Without having code to actually run it's hard to say.
It looks like Cocos2D is built on OpenGL and is made to be simple. I see lots of mention of sprites on their website, but nothing about vector graphics. (I've never used it, so it could be there and I'm just not seeing it.)
If I were in your position, I'd look into cocos2d and see if it does vector graphics at all. If not, I might give Core Graphics a try and see what performance was like. I know OpenGL can do what you want, but it can be difficult to learn, so I'd probably do that last.
I want to build an app similar to Fat Booth, Aging Boot etc. I am totally noob to digital image processing. where should I start? Some hints?
Processing images on the iPhone with any kind of speed is going to require OpenGL ES. That would be the place to start. (If this is your first iOS project, though, I wouldn’t recommend starting off with GL.)
Apple has an image processing example available here: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/samplecode/GLImageProcessing/Introduction/Intro.html.
I imagine the apps you refer to use GL too. Fat Booth, for example, might texture a mesh with your photo, then distort the mesh to make the photo bulge out in the middle. It could also be done purely with fragment shaders.
Ah.. We've developed a good iPhone application. Now, 'm passing through last phases of it, i.e. profiling it and I've encountered few problems. Application has few leaks and objects occupying large memory chunks. We just checked somehow, application is not lowering its memory requirements and blocks remain occupied with creation of each View Controller.
Some of the views I really don't want after their disappearance, but they are not deallocated.
We're also downloading large files into iPhone through app but once we download very large file (> 10 MB), it crashes. Because after download we've also used thumbnail generation logic into which UIImage is created with 'contentsOfFile'..! So, app generally crashes after use of large files. We've used UIWebView for thumbnails.
My real problem is download, thumbnail, preview of larger files... clearing unnecessary memory (objects) once view is not in focus..!
Can anyone help me get rid of such problems easily???
I really don't wanna go through long long code..!
Thank You..!
As has been written hundreds of times on SO, use ASIHTTPRequest for networking, especially for large files. It can stream big files directly to disc so you don't run out of memory. As for creating a thumbnail of a >10mb file, it sounds like you would do yourself a favor by storing a thumbnail on the server instead.
If your views don't unload, something is wrong with your retain/release cycles. Have you implemented viewDidUnload on all your view controllers? Without more details, it's very hard to help.