A little bummed about Game performance, memory leaks
RossmanBrothersGames
Member Posts: 659
Our game is nearing completion and we have started more in depth testing, and I am finding some concerns with game performance.
My game does require a bit from gamesalad, it has a timer going, high score being recorded, combos going on, precision collisions being detected. However I believe my code is very efficient for every mechanic, early on I watched @The_Gamesalad_Guru 's logic videos, and early on revamped my whole coding system making it as short and effective as possible (in my opinion)
And I think the good code shows as the game plays very well when you first play it. However over time of playing it, switching scenes, leaving it open in the background tasks, tons of memory leaks start flowing in.
In testing the game initially it is only using 30-40 mb or ram. Over time this slowly increases with each scene change, if you play the game for 30 mins to 1 hour (which this is definitely a game that can suck you in like that) it can move up to 300-500 mb of ram, not good. Scene loading when I first start the game up is 1-2 secs. If you have the app open for a long time and play a lot of levels this can change to 6-8 secs. Quit the app and start over, go to the same level and it loads quickly in 1-2 secs. Gameplay is slightly effected on my 5s, over long play periods you will notice some dropped frames here and there but nothing that really effects gameplay (thank goodness) however on the iPad 2 with an A5 chip, the game starts out great but after 20 mins of gameplay can get a bit choppy, providing a bad experience.
I believe this is a GS issue since my game plays so great for the first half hour or so. I'm not really worried for people using devices with a7 chips and up, but older devices like the ipad 2 ipad mini 1 and iphone 4s and early may have bad experiences. As well as some slight annoyances with the occasional frame skip on newer devices after long play periods. My game is a tough game with multiple levels and you die a lot in it, to reduce the loading time issue I went in a coded the levels to restart after a death without needing to reset the scene, this helps a lot but still these memory leaks have been talked about on the forums for a long time. @BlackCloakGS any chance version 14 may help with this?