Slade
Member
Hi everyone,
I´ve noticed that my latest addition to my game causes some minor frame rate hickups. Almost everytime I add a new enemy I have to rotate two images, the enemy and its shadow. This leads to a small hiccup which is noticable since the game otherwise runs smoothly at 60 fps.
What´s the best way to do it perfomance wise? Create a texture atlas with every direction possible (only 4) and load each image when its needed? Any other suggestions?
Is it definitely the rotation causing the hiccup? If you add the enemies without rotating them does the problem go away?
If the shadow is partially transparent then the alpha calculations could be part of the problem. Maybe also try losing the shadow to see what effect this has.
Slade
Member
I´ll try to add the enemies without rotating them to see what happens since I kinda just assumed it was the rotation causing it. And yes, the shadow is partially transparent so it might be the problem. Or a combination of both. I´ll try to locate the problem more precisely once I´m home after work today. Thank you for the advice
If the problem still happens when the enemies are not rotated, then maybe you are loading new enemy graphics into memory each time you create one, which can cause a slight delay depending on the size of the graphics in question. In this case you might want to look at re-using the same texture for all enemies, and preloading it before the start of the level.
Slade
Member
That might also be a possibility since I load new enemy graphics into memory every time. Is it possible to draw the same sprite at different locations? I use the following code to load the sprite for each enemy:
SPImage *enemy= [SPImage imageWithContentsOfFile:@"enemy.png"];
I could store it and reuse it once the current enemy is destroyed. I do have a max number of enemies on screen so I could load the sprites in my initGraphics(). Thanks again!
ah - ok, then I think that is definitely your problem!
What you want to do is load the image into an SPTexture once at the start of your game. Store a reference to it somewhere appropriate.
Then each time you create an enemy, use the SPImage imageWithTexture method, passing in a reference to this same SPTexture instance.
This way you are saving memory too, since the image is only loaded into RAM once. There should now be no delay when you instantiate an enemy, since the graphics are already loaded into RAM and ready to use, whereas before there was a delay while the image was retrieved from disk.
ipadfan
Member
Slade,
Consider reading through these links. I got a huge jump in performace using the "atlas_generator" utility included w/ Sparrow:
- http://forum.sparrow-framework.org/topic/sparrow-atlas-generator
- http://forum.sparrow-framework.org/topic/loading-a-texture-atlas-only-once
Good luck.
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