iPhone performance

Hi there,

im working on a platformer aimed for cocoonjs and ios. After several weeks of work i propably came to a point where i realised that its not possible to have a fullscale platformer {best example is propably Random Heroes or Mikey Shorts} running at least decent on iPhone4 not even 5. Im talking about 960x640 view, paralax scrolling backgrounds 2-3, cca 20 -30 enemies in a standard level etc. I dont have any extensive physics or anything. But once i have more like 6 enemies, the fps drops rapidly even on iphone5.

Am i doing something wrong or missing something? Tried most of the tricks with fps, deleted some effects but didnt helped so far. I red the performance tips from ranma which sayed 20 sprites max on screen. Im surely over this limit as im using more combinations of tiles 85 x 85 which i choose because it looks best on iphones for my purposes. I would need a clear answer if its currently worth to put more effort to have it run on iphones or take another course since the technology is not yet there?

You can't make robust games with CocoonJS, only for simple games. You might use this: http://www.gameclosure.com/ It would run any C2 games with GC wrapper following this modification: http://www.gameclosure.com/blog/2013/03/space-blaster-meets-mobile You can try an .apk for Android, it doesn't make choppy peformance like CocoonJS does. I'm working a tutorial about how to integrate C2 games in Game Closure.

iPhone 4 is pretty poor performance-wise, but I've had no issue on iPhone 5. Steady 60fps even for a pretty complex game.

marcel1980 hard to tell how complex your game is, for me, i have like 6~10 collision items on screen at one time, and i can pull 60fps from iphone5 or 45fps from ipad3. (like thehen said, iphone5 is very capable, the question is how many user still using iphone4 or older?)

Joannesalfa look forward to your tutorial!! btw, have u tried ejecta? if you have experience on both, would you mind compare the 2 briefly? :)

hollowthreat Ejecta is only for iOS, I wouldn't like to pay iOS developer program without safe goal. GameClosure would support Android and iOS, Android is ideal to test our games without taking risky.

iPhone 4 is pretty poor performance-wise, but I've had no issue on iPhone 5. Steady 60fps even for a pretty complex game.

Glad to know I'm not alone. If I may ask, what are you guys going to do with the iPhone 4 support?

It seems clear at this point that iPhone 4 will not run our game smoothly and we are thinking how we'll handle the support issues, once the game's out.

— yeah we're in discussions with our publisher with how to tackle this. This has been my suggestion:

Having looked at Android distribution previously, I was aware you could restrict an apps availability by hardware model. It appears you can't do that on iOS.

As we've discussed, we'd only be targeting newer device models. iPhone 4S and above and iPad 2 and above. There doesn't appear to be a way to restrict access in this way.

The closest solution I could find is to restrict availability by device capability. More info here: stackoverflow.com/questions/4718813/how-can-i-restrict-my-ios-project-to-iphone-4-only

We could restrict the game to devices that use Bluetooth LE, effectively limiting to iPhone 4S and above and iPad 3 and above.

Failing that I would suggest just saying it's not supported at the very beginning of the description.

joannesalfa thanks for the info! Looking forward to that tutorial ! It might save my current work ...

marcel1980 hard to tell how complex your game is, for me, i have like 6~10 collision items on screen at one time, and i can pull 60fps from iphone5 or 45fps from ipad3. (like thehen said, iphone5 is very capable, the question is how many user still using iphone4 or older?)

Joannesalfa look forward to your tutorial!! btw, have u tried ejecta? if you have experience on both, would you mind compare the 2 briefly? :)

hollowtreath I have 3 BG layers about 480 x 500 each one tiling with paralax scrolling. About 15 tile types which i use in various combinations {85 x 85 each}. Main character 150 x 150 and some enemies, rotating items- sprites. It seems to slow only if i add another enemies. I have to do more tests if its something specific or just the pure amount of sprites that it slows down.

teh Intel XDK has iOS and Android export.

marcel1980 try take all your BG off, see if that was causing the problem, and slowly adding back BG, if you are testing on iphone4, likely you can only make simple game with cocoonjs :/

...failing that I would suggest just saying it's not supported at the very beginning of the description.

I've also looked into the hw-restrictions, but it seems Apple doesn't like developers doing that... so it would be a bit risky. It seems the latter may be our only option. Thanks anyway!