Measuring and adjusting performance in real-time

I noticed that "Destination out" blend mode with "Force own textures=yes" set on the layer costs about 10-15 fps in performance drop on my older mobile phone.

I'm going to disable this blend mode on slower devices and use an alternative (less nice looking) effect.

So I have 2 questions:

1. What's the best way to measure performance? I'm thinking when the level starts, collect fps on every tick for about 5 seconds, then calculate the average fps. If average fps<30, then disable blend mode.

Is there a better or more reliable way?

2. Is is possible to get masking effect without the "Force own textures" setting?

bump...

Anyone?

1.

It sounds alright to me.

2.

You could paste onto a paster object instead. It's principally the same as layers with force own texture, but you choose what to draw onto it. Anyways maybe it could be faster since you can use use smaller areas, you'd have to test and see. Basically force-own-texture and paster are your only tools for using most of the blend modes.

Thanks, R0J0hound!

1. I'm worried that there may be some background processes running on the phone, or something else that could temporary affect the performance and the average fps will be lower than is should be.

2. I'm using blend mode to mask lots of moving objects (make them partially transparent). So I'll have to redraw the paster object with all sprites overlapping it on every tick? Not sure if this will be faster.

1.

Probably a valid worry, but what can you do? Maybe try getting the average fps several different times and only look at the best or median case to decide to lower the quality?

2.

Probably not, but I have no idea.

dop2000 targeting lower end phones I always try to design without any fancy effects. Could you do a similar but not so pretty solution with only using opacity or alpha channel in the images?

tunepunk, That's exactly what I'm doing when the blend mode is disabled.

But it looks prettier with the blend mode, so I'd like to enable it on faster phones.