Weird weird problem with game (Omega Race 2009 for the iPad).

[MrTAToad]

You weren't using JPEG's were you ?

[Sokurah]

Yes and no.

The backdrop is a JPG. It's always been and I haven't changed it. Should I use PNG instead?
The dot used for the lines is a BMP and the pausebutton was PNG but is now a BMP too.

[MrTAToad]

Yes, JPEGs shouldn't be used at the moment - they do cause problems...

[Millerszone]

Nice looking game!

I waisted a lot of quarters in the arcades playing the original Omega Race.

From what I read the iPad 2's GPU is about 9x faster than the iPad 1.
Would be nice to test on an iPad 1.

I'm going to try this website for my next app:
http://www.testflightapp.com

[Ian Price]

JPEGs cause highly erratic problems on all formats - they might appear to work, but underneath they are messing with everything else in your code. Definitely use .PNG or .BMP instead.

[Sokurah]

JPEGs cause highly erratic problems on all formats - they might appear to work, but underneath they are messing with everything else in your code. Definitely use .PNG or .BMP instead.

Thanks, good to know. Besides, just because a JPG is smaller than other formats I doubt is faster to draw - if anything it should take longer as it needs to be uncompressed, so there's no reason to use that anyway.

BMP is out of the question as they take up too much room, but I'll use PNG for the final version then, as that's more reasonable in size.

@millerszone
If you like it you can get my PC version - it's free and looks just like this version.

Yes, I guess I'll have to screw it seriously up to not have it run on the iPad 2, but I hope it'll run on the first generation too. But we'll see about that once it's relevant.

[Ian Price]

BMP is out of the question as they take up too much room, but I'll use PNG for the final version then, as that's more reasonable in size.

WRONG!!! .PNGs take up exactly the same amount of space when loaded into RAM as a .BMP.

.PNGs also don't compress as well as .BMP in a zip file. Try it - you'll be very surprised. Often the .PNGs will take up more space when zipped.

It's only when .PNGs are sitting in files that they are smaller in size. Once opened and being used they take up the same amount of memory as every other graphics format.

[Sokurah]

BMP is out of the question as they take up too much room, but I'll use PNG for the final version then, as that's more reasonable in size.

WRONG!!! .PNGs take up exactly the same amount of space when loaded into RAM as a .BMP.

Well, I'm not really wrong - I know they're the same size once they're loaded...so we agree on that.
I just meant that BMP files are much bigger as external files than PNG. And I have no need for a filetype that compresses better when zipped, in this case.

[ampos]

Notice that a .ipa file is a .zip file, so the ipa will be smaller with bmp than pngs, although it will eat more space on iPhone "disk" with bmp. Once run, they will eat the same amount of ram.

[MrTAToad]

Glad its working now.

This is one reason why tests should be made on multiple machines, preferably with totally different configurations - and its this one important area that most people cant do.

I, for example, have 4 machines - 2 run XP and 2 run Windows 7.  One uses an Intel internal graphics card and the rest are nVidia.

So, I've no idea what a program runs like on ATI cards, for example, nor on Vista...