App beta published to iPhone, epic lag in movement of any and all actors?? HELP!
OK so we are in the final stages of testing and almost ready to publish our app, after nearly a year of schooling ourselves on Gamesalad and all other aspects of building an iPhone game we have come across a serious setback problem..
Now im sure im not the first person to come across this issue, so surely one you Gamesalad wizards (or warlocks as Charlie Sheen would say..haha) have a fix for me... WINNING!!!
The problem -
I have an actor with boolean triggers for movement (as in there are buttons on the screen display for movement that change boolean to true which triggers actor to move either left or right,) this is all working perfectly and so far the only issue I have noticed in our game is when it has been published via Gamesalad publish manager and then installed on my iPhone 4, the movement of all the falling actors (actors that are falling via gravity towards the main moving left and right actor) and the movement of the main actor in our game is jerky as hell. Almost as if it cant run successfully on the iPhone 4 or it is running at some epic crappy framerate.. I love 8 bit games as much as the next nerd.. but not in my pretty, new iPhone game.. sniff sniff..
I have already been through a massive process of elimination, ie, removed music files from the game which are quite big when converted to gamesalad music.ogg file, removed every little attribute and unused artwork and actors, double checked everything works perfectly in the gamesalad program itself. Which I am aware is only a guide to the actual final gameplay and that the hardware on my iPhone will be different..
The main actors movement is a MOVE behaviour with the movement relative to ACTOR and the speed type is ADDITIVE.. there is a set maximum speed for the actors attributes but even playing with these parameters hasn't achieved the desired results.. WTF is going on?
Even the actors which simply fall via gravity have a lagged jerky movement, its almost as if the game on the iPhone is missing frames when gameplay is up..
Now so far this is one of the only dilemmas stopping us from finishing and proceeding to the publishing stage.. naturally we are anxious to get past this glitch...
So does anyone have any movement tips for getting it to run smooth as glass on the iPhone 4?? I have tried to change the app compatibility to see if that had any difference, but that had no affect..
We downloaded a couple of gamesalad produced games.. ie. Danger Cats (firemaple games) and Stunt Squirrels (firemaple games) and they both run smooth as.. so im not sure what im missing??
My other guess is my artwork made via Adobe Illustrator could be too big?? and making the actors slow due to file size maybe?? I haven.t activated image independence yet, as im not sure exactly what that will do to the game artwork wise and display wise to be honest.. the artwork has been the slowest part of the build and im avoided changing it like the plague!!
Or maybe its the fact that the score engine has a combo counter that could be messing with it, but we have used image change as much as possible rather than actual actor change for scoring numbers and combo notifiers.. so please oh please WISE ONES, help me out.
Cheers,
Dan and Taz from...
Uninspired Productions
check us out on facebook
facebook.com/uninspiredproductions.au
Now im sure im not the first person to come across this issue, so surely one you Gamesalad wizards (or warlocks as Charlie Sheen would say..haha) have a fix for me... WINNING!!!
The problem -
I have an actor with boolean triggers for movement (as in there are buttons on the screen display for movement that change boolean to true which triggers actor to move either left or right,) this is all working perfectly and so far the only issue I have noticed in our game is when it has been published via Gamesalad publish manager and then installed on my iPhone 4, the movement of all the falling actors (actors that are falling via gravity towards the main moving left and right actor) and the movement of the main actor in our game is jerky as hell. Almost as if it cant run successfully on the iPhone 4 or it is running at some epic crappy framerate.. I love 8 bit games as much as the next nerd.. but not in my pretty, new iPhone game.. sniff sniff..
I have already been through a massive process of elimination, ie, removed music files from the game which are quite big when converted to gamesalad music.ogg file, removed every little attribute and unused artwork and actors, double checked everything works perfectly in the gamesalad program itself. Which I am aware is only a guide to the actual final gameplay and that the hardware on my iPhone will be different..
The main actors movement is a MOVE behaviour with the movement relative to ACTOR and the speed type is ADDITIVE.. there is a set maximum speed for the actors attributes but even playing with these parameters hasn't achieved the desired results.. WTF is going on?
Even the actors which simply fall via gravity have a lagged jerky movement, its almost as if the game on the iPhone is missing frames when gameplay is up..
Now so far this is one of the only dilemmas stopping us from finishing and proceeding to the publishing stage.. naturally we are anxious to get past this glitch...
So does anyone have any movement tips for getting it to run smooth as glass on the iPhone 4?? I have tried to change the app compatibility to see if that had any difference, but that had no affect..
We downloaded a couple of gamesalad produced games.. ie. Danger Cats (firemaple games) and Stunt Squirrels (firemaple games) and they both run smooth as.. so im not sure what im missing??
My other guess is my artwork made via Adobe Illustrator could be too big?? and making the actors slow due to file size maybe?? I haven.t activated image independence yet, as im not sure exactly what that will do to the game artwork wise and display wise to be honest.. the artwork has been the slowest part of the build and im avoided changing it like the plague!!
Or maybe its the fact that the score engine has a combo counter that could be messing with it, but we have used image change as much as possible rather than actual actor change for scoring numbers and combo notifiers.. so please oh please WISE ONES, help me out.
Cheers,
Dan and Taz from...
Uninspired Productions
check us out on facebook
facebook.com/uninspiredproductions.au
Comments
Cheers.
What is the value of it? Is it 0?!
Roy
Resolution independance gives retina art for the iphone 4. I suggest searching the forums as theres been lots of helpful topics on it. As a general rule, your graphics need to be double the size of what they are in the editor. For instance, you have a background that is 320 x 480, you would need to have that background as 640 x 960, tick RI and actually scale it to be the 320 x 480 in GameSalad. Then, when an older phone uses you game is makes a set of small images at 320 x 480 but when its an iPhone 4, it uses the high res graphics for a better display.
what is this DeepBlue ideas GS optimiser app you speak of??
Cheers Dan Yes we have swapped over images, we have optimised as many things as we could find.. they are listed above in the original post.. anything else you can think of???
http://www.deepblueapps.com/Deep_Blue_Ideas_Ltd./Home.html
http://www.deepblueapps.com/Deep_Blue_Ideas_Ltd./GS_Optimizer.html
The bottom one is the exact one. The others are just the brand as such. Great set of products check out the bundles very good prices.
Cheers.
the optimizer is awesome
Thanks for your suggestion..
Cheers Dan, WOW awesome info.. looks like I will be resizing alot of my artwork.. it always appeared to be an issue previously so im sure that will polish the game nicely.. thankyou for your suggestion on that.
The gamesalad viewer I have no idea on how to 1. Install the game and run it via Gamesalad viewer.. I remember seeing a video about it once but thats as far as I got. Does it actually give you real time stats on cpu usage on the iphone??? That would be awesome.. any links to forum page walkthroughs?? or possibly youtube video walkthroughs?? epic noob question, I know.. there is much shame.. haha.
Cheers, Dan
Roy