Adobe AIR Development

[owen_]

I've been trying to port some simple Flash games over to the Playbook and I'm running into a massive performance issue that nothing seems to solve. My framerate never seem to go above 10fps even when it runs at a full 60fps in a browser or on the simulator.

I've been through every single 'optimizing for Playbook' article I could find, but nothing seems to even make a dent.

The only thing that works is removing any update or draw calls, so there is practically nothing running in my app. Even then it only get about 30fps and still fluctuates wildly.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this before? I'm hoping it's some flag I've set accidentally, or possibly a hardware issue...

[steve_web]

I'm on my phone right now so I don't have the files handy but I do recall there is a setting in your config XML file to enable GPU rendering. It sounds like this might be disabled or unspecified in yours.

[owen_]

Yeah, I set <rendermode> to gpu but again that barely made a dent in performance. My app is entirely bitmap based so I was hoping it would give a larger boost, but no luck.

[steve_web]

Ah yeah it's a tag called "renderMode" to be set with a value of "gpu".

<renderMode>gpu</renderMode>

In your projectname-app.xml file

[UberschallSamsara]

Just curious - are the built-in apps running smoothly on your PlayBook when your app is running at slow fps?  I've noticed that built-in apps like the browser have sometimes been very unresponsive now that my PB is on 2.1.x.y, and I've also noticed that responsiveness is sometimes impaired after I've played (and closed) a big resource intensive game.  A device restart *seems* to *fix* these issues most if not all of the time.  Have you tested your fps on a fresh reboot of your PB?  

[owen_]

Everything else seems to run fine if I run it at the same time as my app.

Online flash games also run very slow for me, I figured that it was due to Flash running through the browser but now I'm wondering if Flash runs perfectly fine through the browser for other people. Things like YouTube are no issue, but anything more dynamic than that is very slow.

[dmalik]

Will you please provide a little bit more information on your game? Are you using a framework like Flixel or FlashPunk? What tweening engine are you using? Are you using blitting or spritemaps? Are you using filters?

Regards,

Dustin

[owen_]

No framework is being used. The way I'm blitting is very similar to how it's done in Flashpunk, but without the double buffered renderer. For tweens I'm using the TweenLite engine. I am using displacement filters on my main buffer texture at certain points, but I have the same results even with the filter disabled.

[dmalik]

Hmm... Do you have a sample on a site or anything? I wouldn't mind seeing the complexity and trying it on the PlayBook browser.

Cheers,

Dustin

[owen_]

You can take a look at a slightly older version here (http://www.hairygames.com/play-sbace.html).

Keep in mind the version I'm running now has been changed and runs significantly faster (on PC at least) at this point. I've tried running versions on the Playbook with no overlays, filters, sound/music... but it's still running at over 600ms per frame.