Hello Gideros folks
compliments:
Hello, I am Marco. I am an developer. Recently i teamed up with a designer. We are investigating the possibilities of different tools for building (iOs iPad) apps. I have some experience with Unity, which is nice. But the designer and i decided to go 2d, that's troublesome in Unity... So Gideros came along.
I like the quick 'live coding' properties of Gideros. unmatched by other tools as far as i know. And i am beginning to like Lua, really a fun language.
problems:
But it's hard to find in depth documentation, for instance, how about (monitoring) memory. I know collectgarbage("count"), but this only informs about Lua's footprint.
To be precise: I have about 350 sprites on one parent child, all with the same texture... this is ok on iPad 3. But when i double this - now i have 2 sprites, each parenting 350 sprites), only some parts of some sprites show up. (this never happens with Unity when you use your textures wisely). When i change the texture of the sprites with a small one, the same problem occurs. Even if one parent is never added to the stage, the problem occurs in the other -supposedly visible- parent.
In other words, I can really use some Gideros-tips on managing sprites/textures wisely. Our project requires a lot of sprites (only a portion of them has to be on stage at the same time though).
Can anybody tell me if using Meshes is a solution?
I think that removing sprites from stage does not release the memory used for its graphics.
And, I am very curious to the RenderToTexture feature... (and sound features etc;)
I sincerely hope somebody can give some pointers (otherwise i have to switch back to Unity... sigh...)
Happy coding,
Marco
Comments
Here is a little information about memory management:
http://www.giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/comment/9441#Comment_9441
Here you can read more about catching memory leaks with code snippet and projects:
http://giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/comment/20214#Comment_20214
http://giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/comment/20247#Comment_20247
About RenderToTexture it will be out with the OpenGL 2 ES version, which is 1 version away from now
About Meshes, yes it is much faster to use them, especially because you can render almost all with one single Mesh object, but there are limitations to them, as in for example, you can transform images (rotate etc) in Mesh, so you may have to combine Mesh and Sprite hierarchy.