A look at some tips for submitting Apps to the App Store, investigating performance bottlenecks, recommendations on what APIs to use and how to structure them, a look a some frameworks to leverage and a list of interesting ANEs to use in your games.

1. AIR & iOS Mobile Games

2. Overview
A little about me
Memory saving tips
Performance bottlenecks
Development bottlenecks
ANEs and what you need to know
Application XML
Q&A

3. About me

4. About me
Currently:
Principal Programmer at MovieStarPlanet
Based in Copenhagen, Denmark
Previously:
Worked on PC, Nintendo DS and
PlayStation 2 games

5. About this talk
Familiar with Stage3D
Familiar with Adobe Scout
Somewhat familiar with iTunesConnect

6. Memory Saving Tips

7. Object Pooling
Memory allocation in iOS is very slow
The problem is that it doesn’t show up during
PC development

8. Object Pooling
DragonBones on Mobile

9. Object Pooling
169 ms in garbage collection

10. Object Pooling
Use ObjectPooling to prevent garbage
collection
Richard Lord’s Object Pooling class
Gary Paluk’s Object Pooling class

11. Object Pooling
2,897ms down to 695ms
GC No longer #1 concern!

12. Problems with Built in functions
Array.sort()
Array.sortOn()
Matrix3D.decompose()
Sergey Gonchar’s implementation
Vector.splice()
Adobe’s update with insertAt() & removeAt() in AIRSDK
19

13. Memory Saving Tips
Stay away from “new” in your game update
loop or places that get called every frame

14. Memory Saving Tips
At look through Scout

15. Memory Saving Tips
Looking at the code (Main::CheckCollisions)

16. Memory Saving Tips

17. Memory Saving Tips
No more allocations :) (sort of)

18. Memory Saving tips
Using out params
Shows library cares about memory usage
Prevents unnecessary allocations
If you’re writing an API, keep this in mind

19. Memory Saving tips
Sprite sheets
Good for custom move sets
Good for low resolution devices
Great for performance, UV updates only
Does not scale well with hundreds of animations

20. Memory Saving Tips
Frameworks such as DragonBones are here to
help you

21. Performance Bottlenecks

22. Performance Bottlenecks
Bitmap fonts and breaking a draw call
Further reading

23. Performance Bottlenecks
Bitmap fonts and breaking a draw call
Bitmap fonts are stored in a
texture
Your spritesheet is in another
texture

24. Performance Bottlenecks
Same draw call
Potential draw back is limited character set

25. Performance Bottlenecks
Using TexturePacker, create your SpriteSheet
Use a SubTexture to grab the Font Texture
Pass that into Starling’s TextField.registerBitmapFont()

26. Performance Bottlenecks
Further reading:
Batch, Batch, Batch!

27. Development Bottlenecks

28. Uploading Builds
Building to device
Build Types
Provisioning Profiles

29. Can take a few minutes
to compile
Building to device
Need to compile ad-hoc
builds (from FlashDevelop)
Depending on AIR SDK, no
automatic installation on
device -> Need additional
tools

30. idb.exe
Can be found at:
AIRSDKlibaotbiniOSBin
You can upload builds directly to your iOS device using this
(and other useful things)

31. Interpreter, Ad-Hoc & App Store builds
Interpreter : Very fast to build, runs slow on device
Ad-hoc : Slow to build, for development only (with device
UUIDs registered on Apple Developer account)
App Store Build : Final build submitted to Apple via
Application Loader
Pro tip: Build to Android first, much faster iteration times!

32. Provisioning Profiles
What they do:
Ad Hoc: Install on registered devices
Debug profile: Allows you to use Test Flight
Generating that p12 key
App Store: Profile which app is built to be submitted to
App Store

33. Get an iPad AIR
Runs interpreter builds at an acceptable rate
Bonus: interpreter-debug builds can be
debugged if on same Local Area Network!
Great for finding exceptions!

34. ANEs

35. ANEs and what you need to know
iOS and 64-bit
Recommended ANE makers
In App Purchases

36. ANEs and what you need to know
iOS and 64-bit

37. 64 bit iOS builds
Your app’s code is duplicated
Found at 0x00DF19D0 and at 0x020CAF80
About 19MB apart in this case.

38. 64 bit iOS builds
Need to be careful with embedded assets,
since they will be duplicated in your code

39. ANEs and what you need to know
What does this mean for developers?
Additional libraries needed
Backwards compatibility makes your IPA grow in size (possibly
double)
Need to keep up with the platform requirements (Android & iOS)
Highly recommend AIRNativeExtensions by Distriqt

40. ANEs and what you need to know
In App purchases

41. ANEs
Low Memory
Warnings

42. ANEs
Low Memory ANE:
https://github.com/distriqt/ANE-Memory

43. Application XML

44. Application XML
Various compilation parameters
Test Flight on iTunes Connect
AppStore review

45. Application XML
Various compilation parameters
rendermode : direct
depthAndStencil: true

46. Application XML
Test Flight on iTunesConnect
No longer need device UUIDs
Can potentially test on hundreds of
Beta testers
Additional application.xml parameters needed
More info here

47. AppStore review
http://appreviewtimes.com/
Updating your app
iOS versions with AIR SDK versions & some
examples of what could go wrong

48. Questions?
@jav_dev