Collection: iPhone Optimization

I think for the broader boost of our development, it would be usefull if we talk about how best to optimize your game.

For that reason I will start with my own set of tipps that hopefully will help other users.

1. The iPhone has a "massive" 480x320 screen. This means that 64x64 is the maximum size you will need for a regular objects normally. It makes no sense to have larger textures that you reduce to render at the correct size. Backgrounds might be larger naturally.

2. State changes are expensive. What this means is that especially many distinct textures will hurt performance. If you use tilemaps, collect all the tiles in a single / several 1024x1024 texture(s). If you need more than one texture for your tilemap, put those with regional relation into the same so that the texture has to be switched as rarely as possible.
Also check if you can get a character with all its animation on a single texture (at frame sizes of 64x64, you have 256 frames on a 1024x1024. with 32x32 even 1024 frames).


My personal ones:
1. Disable Filter Pad. It will raise the texture sizes. Without it you have full control over the textures and how they are used. This is important, because you have at maximum 24MB of ram to use for your graphics, thats not that much. I'm still toying around to find out how I can get iTGB to create/load pvrtc2 / pvrtc4 textures which would be the optimum.

2. Even thought TGB, if I remember correctly, does that behind the scene: Make your textures square, power of two.


Suggestions for future optimizations in future iTGB versions
1. Best would be if the quadbatcher would be optimized to sort for state changes and the stuff would use it
Additionation with an optimized tilemap system that merges quads where the neightbor textures are identical to reduce the amount of polygons as well. After all, the iPhone is no magical system that will handle ten tousands of polygons. On different boards I read about 7000-9000 polygons onscreen. So the tilesystem definitely has a lot of potential for optimization, most likely one of the best "optimization benefit per invested hour" ratios for the future of iTGB.
I've not checked how far the engine so far is doing that.

2. What I want to have in the end is a "build game" button that compresses alls png to pvrtc2 or 4, depending on a checkbox (uses alpha?) on the texture I set in the game editor. Additionally an option would exist on the texture to tell iTGB that it shall not compress it ("uncompressed"?). This might be usefull/needed for pixel perfect backgrounds at full screensize I think.