Thanks, Ashley, I am looking through it now. There's a lot more room for fine tuning than I thought.

P.S. I really enjoy Construct. I've had a personal license for 2 and now 3 since last summer, and I've found it to be by far the most user friendly development kit I've tried.

I have been using Construct 3's remote preview mode to test my game on different mobile devices. Reworking the game to minimize garbage collection seems to have solved the issues on PC, but my ultimate goal is mobile, so I'm fine tuning stuff there. What I find interesting is that I get wildly different performance between iPhone and Android, but not in the way I would have expected. My iPhone is a considerably nicer platform, and I know from some of the other games I have on it (XCOM, for instance) that it has a fair amount of horsepower, yet it struggles wretchedly on my little auto runner. Remote Preview can't detect the GPU %, but estimates the CPU usage as averaging in the 80% range. It stutters, ridiculously so, almost to the point of being unplayable. I'm using the default browser to test on, which I assume is Safari.

My Android, by contrast, is a comparatively cheap little phone I picked up specifically to test lower range mobile. There's the occasional noticeable hitch, but by and large it runs much smoother. The GPU rating appears on the preview and the CPU usage is way down. I know there are a lot of variables to factor in, but the performance difference still floored me, especially given that the iPhone is, technically speaking, the more powerful piece of hardware. Android is my main focus anyway, since I don't have a Mac to compile on, but still. I'd like to iron out those last little Android slowdowns if I can, but I was just surprised by how it all turned out.

This is all great. Thanks, everyone, for responding in such detail. I’ve seen optimization articles by Ashley in the Construct 2 manuals, but I don’t know if anything definitive has been compiled that reflects the latest technology conditions. I can’t help but wonder how many other tips/tricks/optimizations have been discovered as people push the engine in different ways and for different formats. I’d be very interested in seeing some kind of community style census to pool the best tidbits from everyone’s experiences. I have more to reconsider in my own project just from these posts here. Thanks again.

I thought garbage collection was handled by Construct also, but after someone suggested looking at it I gave it another shot.

My auto runner was plagued by a periodic jank I couldn’t correct no matter what I did. I had a lot of little instances in my game of objects being created or destroyed every few seconds. I also had a lot of sprites I preloaded off-screen then destroyed. I modified my code so the game would load everything it needed to use immediately, and then instead of ever destroying anything, it reuses the same objects over and over. My problem appears to have been garbage collection stutters as the game adjusted itself to each creation and destruction; now the issue has completely vanished.

That got me wondering about what other little tips people might have.

I got some great help on this board the other day. Suggestions about lerp and garbage collection made a big difference in improving performance in my mobile game. I was curious if anyone else has any optimization tricks or things they tend to look at/adjust when getting a game ready for mobile in 2018.

Thanks a lot. I’ll look into garbage collection and try implementing lerp to see if there’s an improvement.

I appreciate the reponse. I’ve occasionally wondered if it has anything to do with the bullet behavior and delta time, since the framerate drop itself is so miniscule (60 to 59 and back), but just enough to cause things to skip forward in order to catch up. The game itself runs extremely smooth except for those random hitches. I tried using minimum framerate or timescaling to smooth out any delta time issues, but the stuttering still occurred, albeit less frequently. I also attempted (and failed) to come up with an alternative way to move things smoothly that wouldn’t be so visibly affected during delta-time hiccups.

I’m hoping that I can find some way to minimize or even bypass whatever aspect is causing trouble.

I am having trouble with an auto-runner I’ve been working on, and I was hoping that someone here might be able to help. I have background layers, coins, and enemies moving in one direction with bullet behavior, passing by a running-in-place player character to simulate movement. The framerate is almost constantly 60, with the occasional brief drop to 59, but I still get annoying stutters. There’s no clear logic behind when the stutters occur, either: I’ve stripped the game down to its most basic, with minimal code and almost no memory usage, yet there they are. I don't think that it's my code or my assets to blame because I see the exact same lurching effect take place in the auto-runner template that came with Construct, like a brief jank or screen tear.

I have all of my sprites pre-loaded into memory, and I’ve experienced the problem on multiple systems/browsers. It’s obvious (and annoying) enough that I’m worried that it’ll be game ruining if I try to sell it anyplace. Otherwise I am very pleased with Construct 2 and 3. If anyone has ideas about how to eliminate it, I’d be grateful.