iPhone Opengl game with ads == fps problem?

Question

I have a game that runs fine as is (around 30fps), but fps went down the drain when I tried to implement ads. I tried Greystripe and iAds but with same result (iAds were maybe bit worse). Average fps is almost same, but there are huge spikes all the times (1-2 spikes per second) and game is unplayable.

I guess it is because ad is in another view. I read somewhere that opengl apps on iphone don't like having another views with them, but there is plenty of games with ads on app store. How do they do it?

My implementation should be ok. I did everything as documentation and samples told me. I have my opengl view and ad view as subviews in app window, adview being in front of opengl view and thus covering part of it. Could this be the problem? Is it better to make opengl view smaller to left space for ad so they don't overlap? Do you have any other ideas what could be wrong?

Answer 1

Lope, I've created a gist at this link with a singleton "AdManager" class I wrote to handle iAds using cocos2d. Cocos2d sits on top of OpenGL, of course, and I've found that this code doesn't affect FPS even for relatively complicated games.

You'll have to modify this a bit to work with your application, changing out the cocos2d calls, etc, but this will give you asynchronous loading of iAds, which should help the FPS issue.

To use this class, include its header and call

[[AdManager sharedManager] attachAdToView:self.view];

wherever you need iAds. The ads will remain hidden until an ad loads, at which time they'll pop up at the top of screen. (The class works for iOS 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2).

Also, I should add that I have cocos2d running inside of an overall UIViewController that I call "Cocos2DController". When I attach the ads to a cocos2d view, I'm using

[[AdManager sharedManager] attachAdToView:[[CCDirector sharedDirector] openGLView]];

Best of luck!

Answer 2

We can hit and miss with apple's choices, but go for the sure thing and implement the ads in other parts to be appealing and not intrusive. It will be better for the framerate, and for you.

Answer 3

Try downloading the ads in a seperate, low priority, thread. You can, thus, nsure that the ads loading does not take too much CPU time. With a bit of CPU synchronisation you can make sure you don't try to display the new ad until it is completely ready to display. Sure it will suck some CPU time away from what you are trying to do but set your priorities right and it should only suck time when you are busy doing nothing.

Answer 4

Please excuse the thread necro'ing here, but I've used Stack Overflow a lot to help me through the problems I've had during coding, and thought my experience might be useful to someone in the future.

My simple cocos2d game ran with decent FPS (rarely changed the FPS display at all) until I implemented AdWhirl (integrating AdMob + iAd only). It would then run OK for the first few iterations, but upon upon the 9th or 10th scene refresh (single screen game, time in each scene < 5 seconds on average) the FPS would dive to ~20FPS, and drop again each time the scene refreshed.

Turns out, in my n00biness (this may be particular to me :) ), I was calling the scene from within itself. That is, once the actions had finished, the last action was to call the main scene again (a lazy way of rebuilding the scene for the user to have another go). This init'd the views and view controllers I had inserted to handle the AdWhirl ads all over again, and not only did I have a memory leak, I had 10+ view controllers all trying to request and service ads from AdWhirl. Once I got a clue and took that self-referring loop out, all was good.