Extremely decreased frame rate when touching to turn repeatedly about sparrow-vs.-cocos

[brianensorapps]

After lowering the map size and removing trees, the game ran smoothly, which led me to believe that there was a graphics memory problem. I tested in Instruments and under 12 megabytes of memory were being used, but always over 50% of the CPU was in use. I'm not sure how to fix this.

[PrimaryFeather]

One thing that always helps when touch events slow the game down is to set all objects that don't need to be touched to "touchable = NO". This does not have to be done with all leaf objects (images, quads), but it suffices (and is even better) to deactivate it as far up in the display tree as possible: in the topmost sprites containing them. When a sprite is untouchable, Sparrow does not have to check its children for touches and can ignore them completely. When there are many objects, this can make a huge difference.

Perhaps this helps!

[jon914]

Something I found to also be a big drag on performance is calling self.width or self.height on Sparrow display objects in tight loops. This appears to call a bunch of code behind that (rather than returning a value right away) and can be a major bottleneck if you're not careful. Replacing it with cached values for those improved framerates on our stuff by 3-4x. Profiling can sniff these kinds of things out.

[PrimaryFeather]

Thanks jon914, you're perfectly right -- it's always a good tip to cache those values when you need them repeatedly. When you've got a complex sprite, calculating the bounds (that is, width & height) is an expensive operation.