Populate - OUT NOW!

Unused iPad graphics are doubling the memory usage or possibly up to tripling it. I'll get to it after a few more things.

It's now in b46 (and e-mailed you the files).

I didn't check memory savings since I'm out of time for tonight but functionally it works. As long as you're hands off the iPad-only atlases on iPhone and vice-versa, you should be OK with memory since it never loads those in.

Even though I get no warnings, on a retina device my game uses more than 100MB of memory at all times. (might be troublesome on the touch 4g because of it's half ram) Judging from your comments about atlases, this is a lot more than soley atlas storage. What else could be taking up so much ram?

If you're unable to run instruments, how are you determining that figure?

There's no fast way to tell what's what. You'd need to dump out the instruments data for me to look, but I'm still quite confident that it's a combination of atlases and sounds (if not set to music, will be stored entirely in memory). Short of including things like video, there's nothing that eats up that much memory.

It may also help to monitor what happens when you purportedly unload things - does the memory usage drop?

SB settings window thing.

On the 3GS some of the internet levels perform like an early 20th century car. Only the ferris wheel level really kills the 3GS in offline mode, though. I'm going to cap the number of balloons that you can place in the level editor, but if it's too small (i.e below the number that the 3gs hits 10 fps) then creativity will be limited. The problem seems to be the balloons, the much more physics orientated bumper objects seem to work fine in large numbers.

That screen doesn't tell you the usage for the app alone - the OS (at the very minimum) and other backgrounded apps are in there too. You would need to run in instruments (I'll do it once we get a stable build) to get the exact usage.

I know, I just got the value before running and while it was in the background.

At the time it was around 200MB remaining, then after running the app it was around 100MB. Instruments doesn't work atm but i'll try and get it working soon.

With instruments, the easiest way to tell if something's not working is if you deliberately unload all the atlases for the second scene and check if the usage drops off as expected.

Is it possible to grab leaderboard data from game center to use it ingame? I need it for part of the final grading animation. If not I can just create a leaderboard duplicate hosted on the level share to reference, although the two leaderboards might become desynced somehow (like if my host goes down/iphone on a dodgy connection gets the data through to apple but not to me, or vice versa).

I'll check.

More than 100 scenes definitely racks up an impressive memory value. It is to be expected, there is a lot of data per scene.

A lot of seperate allocations.

On iOS 5 the game seems a lot slower than usual. Ingame I get less than 60 fps when no action is occuring, I used to get solid 60 unless it was that ferris wheel level.

The main menu just broke down to 15 but jumped back to 60, so I'm not sure what's going on there. The level share's running at... so slow it froze and won't accept input, compared to the previous but still slightly usable 7 fps. I'm probably going to have to drop the view and like counters for each level and display it in the level or something. Or cut one of them (probably views) and place that in the post game.

That's odd and disappointing that the OS would have such a big difference on performance. I haven't tested it on my iPad yet (I could use a more recent build). I'll try tonight.

Which device did you upgrade?

Are you sure it's the OS and maybe not a recent change?

That's odd and disappointing that the OS would have such a big difference on performance. I haven't tested it on my iPad yet (I could use a more recent build). I'll try tonight.

Which device did you upgrade?

Are you sure it's the OS and maybe not a recent change?

iPhone 4. Now it seems to be unable to recover from big fps dips (like upon loading big levels) making it get gradually slower as time goes on. Take out the initial FPS dip though, and the same level that was performing at less than 1 fps performs at 55. One problem would be the iphone being unable to keep up with the updates per second, which shouldn't be happening unless lightweight actors are broken or something.

iPad 2 works fine as it never dips. Haven't tested 3GS yet.