Why Does Setting the Stage Size Matter For Mobile For Full Screen Games?

[ryanr78297412]

Hey all,

I've created a flash game that i'm using adobe air to publish it for mobile devices.  At first I did a lot of research and decided the best stage size would be 960x640 for my game.

My game has been completed and I'm testing it on many devices.  I have it set to go full screen on the device and it runs very slow.  What's i'm noticing is because it's full screen, it really didn't matter the stage size.  On my Note 4, the game stretches to 2560 x 1440 (the devices resolution) and because of the massive number of pixels it needs to render each frame, the game runs slow.

I'm not using any filters, vectors (all text in game is bitmaps), alphas, etc.  The game is entirely bitmaps.  I'm assuming the game runs slow just due to the screen size.

I read people saying "make your game X resolution cause it's best for ipads, or make it X resolution cause it's best for retna displays, etc.  Maybe i'm missing something, but if it's stretched to the devices resolution anyways (my 960x640 game becomes 2560x1440) then did it really matter than much what stage size I started with?

If anyone could help me out that would be very appreciated.  Thanks a bunch!

Ryan

[Colin Holgate · Accepted solution]

There is a stage scale mode that controls how the stage is shown on screens that are different in size to the stage. If you haven't touched that then the default behavior is that the stage is made as big as it can be without any content being cropped off. Your stage really is still 960x640, but is magnified so that the 640 fills the 1440 height, and the 960 fills 2160 of the 2560 width. You should be noticing side borders. How you should deal with different ratio screens is a whole topic for you to research!

Back on the performance problem, there are different rendermodes, and using the wrong one will kill performance. If you're not using Stage3D, GPU rendermode would give the best performance, but if you have a lot of different large bitmaps they will fill up GPU memory quickly, which would cause performance to drop.

I'm hoping that currently you're using CPU or Auto, and that you don't have a lot of big bitmaps. If that's the case changing to GPU might fix everything.

If you're already using GPU you may need to rethink how you are using bitmaps. Try making the bitmaps be smaller, and then scale them back up to the size they need to be on stage. They would then take less GPU memory.

The other rendermode is Direct, and it gives reasonable performance, not as good as GPU, but better than CPU. It doesn't have the same GPU memory issues that GPU mode has, unless you are using Stage3D, in which case you would again have to have smaller bitmaps to avoid performance issues.

Let me know if any of that made sense!

[ryanr78297412]

Thanks for the reply

I am currently not setting the scale mode so it's using the 'SHOW_ALL' by default.  So yes, i'm seeing the black borders on the sides.  I'm okay with that for now.

I am currently using the rendermode GPU.  It was much faster than CPU.  I haven't tried direct yet.  The game background image is larger than I expected (which I just noticed is 1600x1200 and scaled down to fit the 960x640).  Other than that, all other images are much smaller (ie. 150x150 or less)

I'll try next located any images that are too large and scaling them in photoshop in advance.  Hopefully that helps.

Thanks again