How do you really buster a ghost completely?

GeoCoder

While running my benchmark program, I am unable to remove animated sprites completely from the stage. Here is what happened. When starting the benchmark with a bunch of live sprites, an indicator displays a steady rate of 60 fps. After adding dynamically a load of invisible sprites (namely, ghosts) to the stage. The fps rate slows down considerably to, say, 45. After removing dynamically the army of ghosts completely, the rate stays about the same, never going back to 60. How come?

I have enclosed a piece of code where it adds/removes a bunch of ghosts. Hopefully, you might catch the culprit who won't let ghosts bustered away completely.

local ghosts = {}   plusButton:addEventListener( "click", function() for i = #ghosts + 1, #ghosts + 100 do local ghost = AnimSprite.new( "Images/blowfish.png", screenW, screenH ) ghost:setAlpha( 0.0 ) -- invisible sprite -> a ghost stage:addChild( ghost ) ghosts[i] = ghost end print( "*** Ghosts: " .. #ghosts ) end )   minusButton:addEventListener( "click", function() if #ghosts > 0 then for i = #ghosts - 99, #ghosts do stage:removeChild( ghosts[i] ) ghosts[i] = nil end print( "*** Ghosts: " .. #ghosts ) end end )

PS Sorry for the catchy title.

OZApps

In the print statements add ADDED and REMOVED, you will be able to debug better

GeoCoder

@OZ ... thanks for the tip. It does help during debugging.

Am waiting for a solution. Sigh...

OZApps

@GeoCoder, you might not have seen the obvious...

Do you see two events being triggered? I think what's happening is that when you tap, both of the functions get triggered and there is a strong possibility that the remove gets called and then creates the 100 ghosts.

sigh...

OZApps

or there could be something else in your other code which is non apparent. Plus the garbagecollector takes a while to collect and reclaim the space, you need to either wait for that or call it manually.

petec

And one way of seeing if @OZApps is right that the ghosts are being recreated after they have been removed would be to set their alpha to something like 0.5 so that they are not so ghostly.

amin13a

The gosts don't recreate after they have been removed because
in gideros mouse and touch event actuate 1 function
I check the Code and the fps decrease by adding ghosts and increase by removing them.

tkhnoman

did you do collectgarbage() somewhere?

GeoCoder

@tkhnoman yes, by adding collectgarbage ( collect ) at the end of for loop in minus button's function, it returns to the normal fps rate of 60. Great!

I am unaware that Gideros does not allow automatic garbage collector to do the job. But, it is a good news for game development.

tkhnoman

Well, don't do it too much in game. It would lag your game.
In my case, i do collectgarbage("count"), and check if it more than a certain amount (20000 for me), and then do collect garbage only on an event when the user won't be bothered by it.

You would also need to do it on every scene change, for better result.

ar2rsawseen

Yes Gideros uses standard lua garbage collector, which collects it in cycles (Mark and sweep)
http://lua-users.org/wiki/GarbageCollectionTutorial
Because well, collecting it on each frame or loop, maybe too inefficient