The Big Programming Thread - Page 106

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On January 09 2012 00:20 shannn wrote:
A quick question to the more experienced game programmers or any other experienced programmer.

My iOS game that I'm making right now with Cocos2D has a lot of code. There are a lot of improvements to be done and regarding one of these improvements I'm currently wondering how much does a statement cost in performance or how can I check the performance of my game other than looking at the FPS.

E.g. There is a schedule method called update (how convenient ^^) is called every frame. My current capped framerate is at 30 fps. How big does it affect the game performance if I had like a couple of for leaps and other statements in this schedule method? At first I had a lot of code called in this schedule method and now reduced by 2/3rd compared to before.
My FPS won't drop below 30 right now and when I set the fps cap at 60 it usually runs at 45-55ish fps and almost never at
60.

Does anyone know or know how I can check for these performances? I've searched on the cocos2d forums and other community sites but the threads are old and I don't understand them very well yet Hoping some experienced TL'er could explain it to me in a more beginner way

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On January 09 2012 00:55 heishe wrote:


We can't help you with this since we don't know your game. Also you're really vague. For loops and such things never matter, since you're not optimizing for a microcontroller (unless you want to make a game that looks really, really good. In which case microoptimizations like these are necessary. But even then you have to start at other points, like writing custom allocators etc.). 99.9% of your performance will be lost in macro-algorithms. Collision detection broad-phase, narrow phase, the way your entities interact, etc. This is really hard to say without seeing the game and the code.

Generally when you want to check which parts of your code need the most time you use profilers... but I imagine this to be rather difficult since you have to test the game on the actual iOS platforms. A trivial way that I can think of now is to simply manually stop the time of different parts of your code, then sum all parts of the code together and see which part needs the biggest % of time, and start looking for possible optimizations there.

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On January 08 2012 22:24 peacenl wrote:
I was wondering if anyone managed to read out sc2replay files in this thread, basically so far I came accross alot of posts explaning how to unpack the binary code or the bitstream. But when trying this myself I notice that the first part of the replay file is not bit stream at all!

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On January 09 2012 05:16 Jaso wrote:
Question:

I'm currently learning C using Harvard's cs50.net course; it's extremely helpful.
However, as a sophomore in high school right now, I'm also hoping to take the AP Computer Science test before I apply for college which gives me about a year and some to teach myself AP-level Java. Unfortunately, my school does not offer APCS because it is small .

Does anyone have any recommendations? Should I get a strong foundation before moving to Java (even though I know it's more like obj-c), should I just buy an APCS book and jump in, or something else..?

Thanks!

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On January 09 2012 23:58 tofucake wrote:
I had to use LabVIEW in college and it was the devil. That's my only experience with it though. Were you looking for help or something?

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On January 09 2012 01:04 shannn wrote:

Actually that edited idea of yours is not bad. Don't know why I didn't come up with it And I don't really understand profiling yet. I get to see the run time with all the allocations of objects and such in a graph but I seriously do not understand what all that means So the checking time is actually sufficient since I log every method and I can tell after summing all up where most time is at.

And I was talking generally so I couldn't really say it in a specific detail as it was a general question :D your post has helped so thanks :D

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On January 09 2012 00:55 heishe wrote:


We can't help you with this since we don't know your game. Also you're really vague. For loops and such things never matter, since you're not optimizing for a microcontroller (unless you want to make a game that looks really, really good. In which case microoptimizations like these are necessary. But even then you have to start at other points, like writing custom allocators etc.). 99.9% of your performance will be lost in macro-algorithms. Collision detection broad-phase, narrow phase, the way your entities interact, etc. This is really hard to say without seeing the game and the code.

Generally when you want to check which parts of your code need the most time you use profilers... but I imagine this to be rather difficult since you have to test the game on the actual iOS platforms. A trivial way that I can think of now is to simply manually stop the time of different parts of your code, then sum all parts of the code together and see which part needs the biggest % of time, and start looking for possible optimizations there.

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