I've started using LibGDX some time ago and I was making a test project to get used to this library. I've created some images and added them to the assets folder and loaded each image as a Texture using the AssetManager. Everything was working fine and I had 60 FPS.
I wanted to work in a more efficient way so I packed all my images into an atlas using the TexturePacker tool. I loaded the atlas using the AssetManager again and started using TextureRegions instead of Textures.
After this change I've started to notice sudden drops in FPS from 60 to 50 and even 30 once. I've tried to change the pixel format to RGBA4444, I've made sure that the min and mag filter were both seth to Nearest, but still I see those annoying frame drops.
I'm not doing anything heavy in the game itself, it's currently some actors in a stage. I got some MoveActions and Animation, but nothing special yet.
Does anyone have a clue what can cause the FPS drop?
Thanks
Thanks for all the comments, I've solved the problem.
I called AssetManager.update on render, and when it finished loading I loaded all the regions into static fields for easy access.
The problem was that it was called every time even after I populated all the fields. I guess all the repeating findRegion calls made those hiccups. So basically the problem was too much processing in the render loop.
Hope it will help someone.
Related
I am using tweens in LibGdx and I use delta to update.
If I count ms (with System.currentTimeMillis) between calls to render I get around 16ms on my Android phone. When I log that time vs delta time I get different values. Sometimes delta is like 4000ms and sometimes 16ms. This also occurrs for raw delta time. It totally screws up my tween animation, although I don't see the same behaviour on the Desktop application. Can anyone explain this behaviour? If I go with System.currentTimeMillis I get consistent nice tween animations...
I'm making a game based on simple song creation, and I'm planning on having a feature where players can listen to the songs they've created with the game. the rhythm of the melody is controlled with a system of timers, but this will not work for the backing track presets I am planning on implementing, as each mp3 file in the backing tracks represents one bar instead of one note.
while it would be possible to use my timer system for playing the backing tracks, this would require several more audio files, much more coding and would push the project far behind schedule. therefore, i need to manipulate the playback speeds of the files I already have. I've commonly seen two examples of how to do this, here: http://2008.kelvinluck.com/2008/11/first-steps-with-flash-10-audio-programming/ and here: http://blog.andre-michelle.com/2009/pitch-mp3/
the problem with both of these is that they also alter the pitch as well. this is a problem for me, as I would very much like players to be able to alter the pitch and tempo of their songs separately. I think the code I need is similar to the examples above, but I'm having trouble understanding those since I haven't had much experience with bytearrays and such. I'd like to be able to understand the examples i included so that I can figure out what I need to do in order to get my game working the way it should, but help of any sort is appreciated. thank you =)
You can try https://github.com/also/soundtouch-as3
there is an early (alpha) demo at http://static.ryanberdeen.com/projects/soundtouch-as3/demo/player/stretch.swf
quality is "acceptable" if you are using 1.0x-1.5x factor (less than 1.0 gives very artificial distortion)
You could also try :
http://iq12.com/old_blog/2009/08/25/real-time-pitch-shifting/
test : Online demo
Their online demo didn't load a track for me (deleted MP3?), so I put a recompiled SWF on my server just for testing. It loads this MP3 audio clip, if you wanna compare results to original sound.
It aims to preserve audio length (time scale) whilst adjusting pitch (deeper when slow or higher when faster). You could possibly combine this with Kelvin Luck's Second Steps.... Thereby having example codes for speed and pitch.
It was inspired by some C# code ported from this C code as found at (with concept explanation) : http://blogs.zynaptiq.com/bernsee/pitch-shifting-using-the-ft/
I have an application, built using Actionscript 3, that plays mp3 files. AS3 sometimes reports the length of the file incorrectly. I asked a question about this a couple of weeks ago and got a link to:
http://www.kirupa.com/forum/showthread.php?332063-Incorrect-sound-length-property-value
I am including the correct length in an XML file, and thought it would be fairly easy to get AS3 to play the file correctly using that value. Unfortunately the file stops playing at the length AS3 thinks is the right value rather than the real length.
Is there a solution?
A few things you could try:
-Check the events your using. Use Event.complete to make sure your sound is fully loaded before you get the length.
OR
-Try using a timer and set it to the length you gave in the XML file.
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/flash/utils/Timer.html#Timer%28%29
It depends on what your doing, but there is a possible problem of audio stopping or looping if the window goes out of focus. Try keeping the window in focus and see if that is your problem. if it is, you may need to use event.activate and event.deactivate to pause the audio.
http://www.emanueleferonato.com/2011/03/29/pausing-a-flash-game-or-movie-detecting-its-focus/
Sort of an answer, not one I like, but maybe this is what we need to do:
Decided to load the song into Blaze Audio's RipEditBurn Plus and do a reconversion, just to see what happens. With the cursor over the file name, the correct length comes up before I load it. Amazing- why does AS3 get it wrong?
The new file works and AS3 reads the correct length. There seems to be something wrong with the original file. The file size on both files is exactly the same.
If I don't get a better answer in the next day or so I'll mark this as the correct one, but it would be nice to have a better way to do this.
Edit- YIKES!!!!! I had renamed the song before running it with the app. Everything works fine. So I just changed the name back- and it comes out the wrong length!!!????? Long ago I worked with mp3 file formatting, but I don't remember anything in the header that would cause this problem. And the name of the song is Ayize- it's a South African song. If I just make it ayize it works.
Very, very strange.
I found the real answer, and it's pretty crazy. I had set the project aside while I did some other things, got back to it a couple of days ago. I had a different set of songs, some of which I needed to edit. I tried the edited versions, and AS3 played the non-edited version! I realized that because I am streaming these from a host, AS3 seems to keep a copy someplace on my computer of the original.
If I had run it on a different computer I would have known immediately, but at least I finally did find out what was going on.
I'm new to Actionscript. There's probably a better way to do this, and if there is, I'm all ears.
What I'm trying to do is have a background layer run for, say 150 seconds in a loop. Then have another layer (we'll call it Layer 1) with a single object on it loop for 50 seconds. Is there a way to have Layer 1 loop 3 times inside of that 150 seconds that the background layer is looping?
Here's the reason I want Layer 1 to be shorter:
When a certain combination is entered (for example, A1), an item will pop out of and in front of the object on Layer 1.
I haven't written any code for it yet, but my hopeful plan is to have the background layer run continuously then have different scene sections on Layer 1 for each of the items coming out of the object on Layer 1. That way when A1 is entered, Layer1 can goToAndPlay(51) without messing up the background layer.
If it helps you understand it at all, it's a vending machine project. My group's vending machine is the TARDIS. The TARDIS is flying through space while you're entering what you want out of the vending machine and stuff is popping out of it.
If I understand correctly, the background is a MovieClip that loops within its own timeline. When Flash plays through a timeline, the timing is dependent on the performance of the computer and how complex the animation is. You can add an audio track set to 'streaming' to lock the timing down, which will then drop frames if the CPU is overloaded. I have used a silent sound set to loop infinitely and play mode 'streaming' to do this when there is no audio to be used.
Instead of using timeline animations I would recommend using TweenMax http://www.greensock.com/tweenmax/ as it allows tween chaining, that is creating a chain of sequential and parallel tweens. When you use a tween you define the timing in seconds and can use values like 1.25 seconds. It will be accurate to the timing you define. You can also run methods on complete, use easing and all sorts of goodies. If you get comfortable using this you will be able to create much more complex interactions in your Flash projects and also be able to change animations and timing much easier than messing with the timeline.
In fact when hiring Flash developers we always screen candidates by asking if they prefer to do animations on the timeline or programmatically. Although Flash is on its way out, still good to learn as the ideas will apply to javascript and whatever new technology comes about.
I'm building a remote presentation tool in AS3. In a nutshell, one user (the presenter) has access to a "table of contents" HTML page with links for each slide in the presentation, and an arbitrary number of viewers can watch the presentation on another page, which in turn is in the form of a SWF that polls the server every second to ensure that it's on the right slide. Whenever the admin clicks a slide link in the TOC, the database gets updated, and on its next request the presentation swf compares the label of the slide it's currently displaying to the response it got from the server. If the response differs from the current label, the swf scrubs through the timeline until it finds the right frame label; otherwise, it does nothing and waits for the next poll result (a second later).
Each slide consists of a movieclip with its own nested timeline that loops as long as the slide is displayed. There's no actionscript controlling any of the nested movieclips, nor is there any actionscript on the main timeline except the stop();s on each keyframe (each of which is a slide in the presentation).
Everything is built and working perfectly. The only thing that's troubling is that if the presentation swf is open for long enough (say, 20 minutes), the polling starts to have a noticeable effect on the framerate of the movieclips animating on any given slide. That is, every second, there's a noticeable drop in the framerate of the animations that lasts about three-tenths of a second, which is quite noticeable (and hence is a deal-breaker for the whole presentation suite!).
I know that AS3 has issues with memory management, and I've tried to be diligent in my re-use of objects and event listeners. The code itself is dead simple; there's a Timer instance that fires every second, which triggers a new URLRequest to be loaded by a URLLoader. The URLLoader is reused from call to call, while the URLRequest is not (it needs to be initialized with a new cache-killing value each time, retrieved from a call to new Date().time). The only objects instantiated in the entire class are the Timer, the URLLoader, the various URLRequests (which should be garbage-collected), and the only event listeners are on the Timer (added once), the URLLoader (added once), and on the routines that scrub backwards and forwards in the timeline to find the right slide (and they're removed once the correct slide is found).
I've been using mr doob's stats package to monitor memory usage, which definitely grows over time, so there's gotta be a leak somewhere (it grows from ~30 MB initially to > 200 MB after some scrubbing and about 25 minutes of uptime).
Does anyone have any ideas as to what might be causing the performance problems?
UPDATE: I'm not entirely sure the performance troubles are tied directly to memory; I ran an instance of the presentation swf for about 15 minutes and although memory usage only climbed to around 70 MB (and stayed there), a noticeable hiccup started appearing at one-second intervals, coinciding with the polling calls (tracked via Firebug's Net panel). What else might cause stuttering movieclips?
I know this is coming a bit late, but I have been using Flash Builder's profiler frequently and one thing I found is that the TimerEvent generated by the timer class
uses up quite a bit of memory individually and
seems to not get released properly during garbage collection (even if you stopped the timer and removed all references to it).
A new event is generated for each Timer tick. I use setInterval instead, even though a few AS3 evangelists seem to recommend against that. I don't know why. setInterval still generates timer events, but they appear to be garbage-collected properly over time.
So one strategy may be that
you replace the Timer with a call to setInterval() ... which is arguably more robust code anyway and
(CAUTION) force garbage collection on each slide scrub (but not on each poll). See this question for more details on the pros and cons.
The second suggestion is only a stop-gap measure. I really encourage you to use the profiling tools to find the leak. Flash Builder Pro has a 60-day trial that might help.
Finally, when moving to a completely new slide SWF (not a new timeline position in the current slide), how are you making sure that the previous slide SWF got unloaded properly? Or am I misunderstanding your setup and there is only one actual slide SWF?
Just two things that came into my mind:
Depending on the version of the Flash player and the cpu usage the garbage collections sometimes does not start before 250 MB (or even more) memory are consumed.
Moviesclips, Sprites, Loader and whatever that has an Eventlistener listening will not be killed by the garbage collection.
So I believe your problem is, that either the slides or the loader are not cleaned correctly after you used them, so the were keept in memory.
A good point to start reading: http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2006/06/as3_resource_ma.html