AIR & iOS Mobile Games

Overview

A little about meMemory saving tipsPerformance bottlenecksDevelopment bottlenecksANEs and what you need to knowApplication XMLQ&A

About me

About me

Currently:Principal Programmer at MovieStarPlanetBased in Copenhagen, Denmark

Previously:Worked on PC, Nintendo DS and PlayStation 2 games

About this talk

Familiar with Stage3D

Familiar with Adobe Scout

Somewhat familiar with iTunesConnect

Memory Saving Tips

Object Pooling

Memory allocation in iOS is very slow

The problem is that it doesn’t show up during PC development

Object Pooling

DragonBones on Mobile

Object Pooling

169 ms in garbage collection

Object Pooling

Use ObjectPooling to prevent garbage collection

Richard Lord’s Object Pooling classGary Paluk’s Object Pooling class

Object Pooling2,897ms down to 695ms

GC No longer #1 concern!

Problems with Built in functions

Array.sort()Array.sortOn()Matrix3D.decompose()

Sergey Gonchar’s implementation

Vector.splice()Adobe’s update with insertAt() & removeAt() in AIRSDK 19

Memory Saving Tips

Stay away from “new” in your game update loop or places that get called every frame

Memory Saving Tips

At look through Scout

Memory Saving Tips

Looking at the code (Main::CheckCollisions)

Memory Saving Tips

Memory Saving Tips

No more allocations :) (sort of)

Memory Saving tips

Using out paramsShows library cares about memory usage

Prevents unnecessary allocations

If you’re writing an API, keep this in mind

Memory Saving tips

Sprite sheetsGood for custom move sets

Good for low resolution devices

Great for performance, UV updates only

Does not scale well with hundreds of animations

Memory Saving Tips

Frameworks such as DragonBones are here to help you

Performance Bottlenecks

Performance Bottlenecks

Bitmap fonts and breaking a draw call

Further reading

Performance Bottlenecks

Bitmap fonts and breaking a draw call

Bitmap fonts are stored in a texture

Your spritesheet is in another texture

Performance Bottlenecks

Same draw call

Potential draw back is limited character set

Performance Bottlenecks

Using TexturePacker, create your SpriteSheet

Use a SubTexture to grab the Font Texture

Pass that into Starling’s TextField.registerBitmapFont()

Performance Bottlenecks

Further reading:Batch, Batch, Batch!

Development Bottlenecks

Uploading Builds

Building to device

Build Types

Provisioning Profiles

Can take a few minutes to compile

Building to deviceNeed to compile ad-hoc builds (from FlashDevelop)

Depending on AIR SDK, no automatic installation on device -> Need additional tools

idb.exe

Can be found at:AIRSDK\lib\aot\bin\iOSBin

You can upload builds directly to your iOS device using this (and other useful things)

Interpreter, Ad-Hoc & App Store builds

Interpreter : Very fast to build, runs slow on device

Ad-hoc : Slow to build, for development only (with device UUIDs registered on Apple Developer account)

App Store Build : Final build submitted to Apple via Application Loader

Pro tip: Build to Android first, much faster iteration times!

Provisioning Profiles

What they do:

Ad Hoc: Install on registered devices

Debug profile: Allows you to use Test Flight

Generating that p12 key

App Store: Profile which app is built to be submitted to App Store

Get an iPad AIR

Runs interpreter builds at an acceptable rate

Bonus: interpreter-debug builds can be debugged if on same Local Area Network! Great for finding exceptions!

ANEs

ANEs and what you need to know

iOS and 64-bit

Recommended ANE makers

In App Purchases

ANEs and what you need to know

iOS and 64-bit

64 bit iOS builds

Your app’s code is duplicated

Found at 0x00DF19D0 and at 0x020CAF80

About 19MB apart in this case.

64 bit iOS builds

Need to be careful with embedded assets, since they will be duplicated in your code

ANEs and what you need to knowWhat does this mean for developers?

Additional libraries needed

Backwards compatibility makes your IPA grow in size (possibly double)

Need to keep up with the platform requirements (Android & iOS)

Highly recommend AIRNativeExtensions by Distriqt

ANEs and what you need to know

In App purchases

ANEs

Low Memory Warnings

ANEs

Low Memory ANE:https://github.com/distriqt/ANE-Memory

Application XML

Application XML

Various compilation parameters

Test Flight on iTunes Connect

AppStore review

Application XML

Various compilation parameters

rendermode : direct

depthAndStencil: true

Application XMLTest Flight on iTunesConnect

No longer need device UUIDs

Can potentially test on hundreds of Beta testers

Additional application.xml parameters needed

More info here

AppStore review

http://appreviewtimes.com/

Updating your app

iOS versions with AIR SDK versions & some examples of what could go wrong

Questions?@jav_dev