Starting around yesterday, I experienced slight lag in a few games I have, including DDR-S, Zenonia, and Castle of Magic, the most noticeable being DDR-S, which is also a killer because lag means it's impossible to tap the arrows at the exact time. With Zenonia the character would freeze for a fraction of a second, but does not happen too often. With Castle of Magic, the cutscenes' framerate is slightly reduced. I have restarted my iPhone twice now, and I did not download anything except games, or change any settings. It's also not a low disk space problem because I've had 2GB free space for at least a month now, and now it's still 2GB free space. Did anyone else experience this or know of a solution? Edit: I'm using FW 2.2.1, not 3.0.
When Apple Introduced 3.0 they changed some of the Audio Session. One of the sessions in 2.2.1 would use the Hardware to decode compressed audio (such as Mp3). In 3.0 that same session now uses Software to decode compressed audio. That decompression will impact performance. That's why we had to put out an update to Top Gun.
Oh I forgot to mention, I did not upgrade to 3.0 due to hesitations about restoring all app data after jailbreaking it again (and jailbreaking it again is a nasty process to start with).
I'm experiencing SEVERE slowdowns from Flight Control and Harbor Master, funny that they're both the same genre. App opening times are also a little slower... music turned off for both of those games but they still have framerate issues. Hope this gets fixed sooner or later.
Can you elaborate? According to the docs you still get 1 hardware decoded track, and the rest are decoded in software where previously the software decoded tracks would simply fail to play. I can see this being a problem if a game tries to play music over existing iPod playback but I'd think the noise would tip the user off in that case. As far as general slowdowns are concerned, system background tasks (especially network access) can really destroy performance in games. OS 3.0 might be worse in that regard than 2.x and some games may be more prone to those effects depending on the aggressiveness of their run loops/threads.
You do, they just changed the audio session a lot of us use. Now we need to set our games to AmbientSolo or Mediaplayback, where before it was just Ambient.
So, if your session is set to Ambient you *always* get software decoded audio? Yikes, sounds like a bug or at least poor planning on Apple's part - first-come-first-served would make more sense IMHO.
RE Harbor Master - Thanks for reporting this. Do you have a lot of push notifications coming in? We tested extensively on 3.0 and had no speed problems. What device are you using?
Aren't you on a 1st gen iphone like I am? If so it's an issue with push notifications. Both games have a lot of things happening at once (Adding more vehicles, different speeds, creating paths, keeping score), 1st gen is already pretty low on speed, add the overhead that runs cell functions, and the added strain of the constant connection with Apple's server and you have some serious slowdown. I've had some bad issues with it on many games and even had my iphone become blazing hot in the simplest tasks. Turns out it also had to do with ATT not allowing data connections on prepaid plans in order to force me into a contract (I wish I could sue ATT, seriously). Just like with a normal cell if you can't get a signal it will keep searching until it gets something. Well the connection with the Apple push server is the same way. While playing a game the firmware is still checking. My best guess is that if a connection is found it will stop wi-fi and put me on EDGE so I conserve battery power. But since I don't have a data plan it keeps me on wi-fi but loops the check over EDGE. After a jailbreak I disabled EDGE and all games are working just like they should. Hope That Helps! Cheers
