I am creating this sort of first person shooter game for the iPhone 6 Plus, but when I introduce any lights to the scene, the frame rate goes from an already barely acceptable 12fps to an absolutely unplayable 2fps. Also, introducing a particle system with more than ten particles in it takes the frame rate to 9fps. I have already made it so that it adds all the walls and doors to a map node, and then flattens it using flattenedClone and adds that. I am unsure what else I can do without switching to Metal. But I am also wondering about this because if SceneKit were so slow, why would it even exist?
Problem solved: get a developer licence!
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I am new to ARKit. I am trying to add so many new nodes into the sceneview in front of my camera. I wanna add objects like cylinder and sphere with different colors. the problem is my frame speed will drop significantly and my phone starts to lag so much after I add 30 objects to the scene. I searched for a solution so much and I found this function to be helpful. prepare(_:completionHandler:). This was how I was adding my objects to the scene without prepare function.
self.sceneView.scene.rootNode.addChildNode(cylinder)
and now I am using the prepare function like this:
self.sceneView.prepare([cylinder], completionHandler: { (success) in
self.sceneView.scene.rootNode.addChildNode(cylinder)
})
Now frame drops like before, also the app will crash after adding 50 objects to the scene.
I think I am not using it correctly and I don't know how to use it?!
Also, I am thinking what else I can do to better my ARKit app?
How you're adding the objects is independent of the frame rate that you're seeing, and when you use all the memory available. The different method of adding objects can be useful for keeping the UI responsive, but you will need to optimize (or use more powerful hardware) when placing a lot of objects into an ARKit scene.
If you're trying to understand your ARKit performance, the medium article on ARKit 1.5 vs. 2.0 might be useful.
My team and I are working on a SpriteKit based iOS game of medium complexity. There are lots of layers and nodes to the design of the game and the zPositioning of the nodes has gotten sloppy. One task I have agreed to take on is the revamping of our zPosition strategy: moving to constants instead of magic numbers, having a holistic zPosition scheme for the app, etc. but first I want to analyze where we are at now. So here is my question:
I vaguely recall watching a WWDC video (or some other tutorial, maybe) in which the person showed using some aspect of Instruments (or some other tool) to show a 3D rendering of an app, seen from an isomorphic angle, based on the zPosition of the SKNodes (or UIKit elements?) in the app.
Does anyone here know what tool this is? And if not, what is the best way to visualize the current state of zPositions in a SpriteKit based app? Thanks!
My project runs at 55-60FPS on an iPhone 6 but anything older is completely unplayable because something is eating CPU.
I think the issue is related to the number of tiles and layers on my map (64x256 with 4 layers) and Instruments shows "SKCRenderer:preprocessSpriteImp(..." taking 5198ms (23.2%) running time.
Does JSTileMap load every single tile's image (visible or not) at once? This post from RW indicates that is the case and that it could be worked around for large performance boosts:
http://www.raywenderlich.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=9479
In another performance note - Sprite Kit checks all it's nodes and
decides which ones it needs to display each frame. If you have a big
tile map, this can be a big performance hit. JSTileMap loads all the
nodes (SKSpriteNode for each tile) when it loads the tile map. So, I
was also seeing performance issues in the Sprite Kit version with my
maps (which are 500 x 40 tiles). I added a check to my version of
JSTileMap that's included in the kit that marks the hidden property of
each tile, then intelligently unhides and hides only the tiles that
enter/exit the screen space. That increased performance on these
larger maps significantly.
Unfortunately that post does not go into detail regarding the steps taken to remedy this.
My first thought was to (I'm a beginner, please be gentle) create an array of nodes by looping through each point and checking for a tile on the specific layer. From there I'd work on adding/removing them based on distance from the player.
This didn't work, because the process of adding nodes to an array simply caused the app to hang forever on larger maps.
Could someone lend a hand? I'd love to work with larger/more complicated tilemaps but this performance issue is destroying my brain.
Thanks for reading!
UPDATE: Big thanks to SKAToolKit: https://github.com/SpriteKitAlliance/SKAToolKit
Their culling feature solved my problem and I'm now running even larger maps at less than 35% CPU.
JSTileMap has some issues handling larger maps but you do have a couple of options to consider:
Break your large map into several smaller pieces and load each new piece as required.
Only load those objects which are in the player's vicinity.
Only load those tiles which are in the player's vicinity.
I personally found it impossible to accomplish #3 with JSTileMap as I could not locate an array holding the map tiles. I solved this issue by using the SKAToolKit which provides easy access to map tile arrays. It is an excellent resource for parsing maps created in Tiled.
I am creating a game using cocos2dx 2.1.4. Its FPS drops continuously , and never recover.
Please find the details as follows
Background about the way I am doing things:-
Its game about scrolling down some shapes, each shape is made up of some square blocks.I have 7 kind of blocks. All loaded in a Sprite Sheet and using these blocks from this sprite sheet I create a shape.
A level file is consist of these shapes. I load two levels at the same time one onscreen and another off screen to make it seamless scrolling. For loading two levels at the same time I used two different CCSprite game batch nodes as :-
CCSpriteFrameCache::sharedSpriteFrameCache()->addSpriteFramesWithFile("56blackglow.plist");
_gameBatchNode1 = CCSpriteBatchNode::create("56blackglow.png", 200);
_gameBatchNode1->retain();
this->addChild(_gameBatchNode1,kForeground);
_gameBatchNode2= CCSpriteBatchNode::create("56blackglow.png", 200);
_gameBatchNode2->retain();
this->addChild(_gameBatchNode2,kForeground);
The problem I am facing is that as I keep on playing the game frame rate drops continuously , from 60 fps till 10 fps and never recovers or might recover in near future , as I observed for 20 minutes but its too much time to wait.
My observations:-
1> I used Time profiler it shows maximum time is in draw() calls. Also if I play game very fast the peak of time increases in track, that should be fine as I am giving more work to do, but once a peak is attained it remains approximately at that height only, even if I leave the game Idle. Is it normal ? According to me it should have returned to its normal peak once the current work is done.
2> Some where I thought its happening because I used two batch nodes and removing its children on a user touch immediately might causing it slow but then after removing the children it should run normal. to give an idea is it ok to remove 10 children from batch node immediately ? some guys say its very slow process. Just to check if this causing problem , I did :-
Instead of removing them I just set visibility of the children to false.But still FPS drops and never recovers.
Please share your thoughts on this.
Though SpriteBatchNodes are generally quite good for drawing a lot of elements efficiently, I think there are best used for static/not-so-dynamic elements. In your case, if you have a lot of elements which go out of the screen but are still alive the draw() function will have to make some checks, thus hogging your performance (even if you set isVisible(false); explicitly, it still nedds to be checked).
In your case I think it would be better if you simply added new shapes outside of screen via some time-based function, and if they scroll outside of view simply remove them from scene, without using batchNodes.
Just found that with every touch, I am adding 8 new sprites to the layer, and its adding every time I touch . So with time I am giving more and more work to do. This is the problem
Actually I wanted to replace the sprite at 8 places with a touch, the way I was doing every time :-
_colorBottom1=CCSprite::createWithSpriteFrameName(png[0]);
this->addChild(_colorBottom1,kForeground);
_colorBottom1->setPosition(ccp((_colorPanelLeftPad)*_blockWidth,_blockWidth));
It was causing this sprite to be added with every touch.
but it should have been (Replace the texture instead of creating the Sprite again):-
CCSpriteFrame *frame1=CCSpriteFrameCache::sharedSpriteFrameCache()->spriteFrameByName(png0);
_colorBottom1->setDisplayFrame(frame1);
I have seen the usage of plist and png atlasses for the game i am developing. However I've notice a slight performance swiftness(speed up) keeping the 60 fps, and for a side note my app has not crash at the moment.
The thing is I noticed I have used SpriteFrameCache with plist to do CCactions and animations for my characters(sprites). However some of the characters ive been using SpriteBatchnode, but it was on accident, since I am relatively new to deep development of a game, I didnt notice this difference before, they both work, but I feel like both are the same, its just that one has an easier way of implementation than the other, i was thinking that perhaps it was developed in an earlier version....
so my question is. is there a difference between the two? will my game benefit for using SpriteFrameCache over SpriteBatchNode?
Thanks for the help.
FYI: this doesnt slow down my developing, its just a question because I know at the end when my game is finished maybe i would want to optimize performance for my game.
Batch nodes draw all child sprites in one draw call.
Sprite frames hold a reference to a texture and define a region in the texture to draw from. The cache allows you to access sprite frames by name.
Both are different concepts, they are not replacements for each other. You can use sprite frames to create sprites or sprite frame animations. In addition to that sprite batching enables you to speed up rendering of two or more sprites using the same texture.
Note that if you use a batch node with only a single child sprite this will not be any different from rendering the sprite without the batch node, since both create a single draw call so there is no positive effect in using the batch node.