HELP! Scaleform image quality ios

[peterfhannon]

Hi All,

I have followed the scaleform IOS tutorials and have verified that I have done everything correctly. Everything works ok in the editor and mobile preview, but the images are terrible quality when I get them onto the ipad.
Has anyone managed to get images displaying correctly on ipad?

I'm supposed to be releasing my game today... why did I leave this to the end .

Thanks,

Peter

[Solid Snake]

You can try using the PVRTC 4 option at the cost of more memory.

[peterfhannon]

I have tried setting that on the ui textures that were Imported when I import my swf, and it made no noticeable difference... but I'm suspicious that this and other udk content settings may be being bypassed, with scaleform doing its own thing with images taken straight from the images folder tied to the SWf file that the scaleform tutorials say to create.

Solid Snake, can you confirm you have a working scaleform GUI on an iPad/iPhone? Do the ui images show at the correct resolution? Are you using the latest (may) udk? did you create the folder of images the Matthew Doyle tuts advise to create, and export the images for action script, giving a name minus the file extension and use lossless compression?

Thanks a lot for helping me out,

Peter

[dprat0821]

I suggest you forget Scaleform on ios devices, at least now. It's not well supported, and provides terrible performance. I doubt that's why Jobs rejects flash...

I have tried setting that on the ui textures that were Imported when I import my swf, and it made no noticeable difference... but I'm suspicious that this and other udk content settings may be being bypassed, with scaleform doing its own thing with images taken straight from the images folder tied to the SWf file that the scaleform tutorials say to create.

Solid Snake, can you confirm you have a working scaleform GUI on an iPad/iPhone? Do the ui images show at the correct resolution? Are you using the latest (may) udk? did you create the folder of images the Matthew Doyle tuts advise to create, and export the images for action script, giving a name minus the file extension and use lossless compression?

Thanks a lot for helping me out,

Peter

[Solid Snake]

My current tests demonstrates the exact opposite dprat0821.

[dprat0821]

Maybe not that terrible, since discussions will only be meaningful when based on compare. In fact we have tested basic movement/rotation/scaling animations in comparing with Canvas(both on practical and pressure perspectives,with out ActionScript), to find Scaleform eats 5-8 fps more. Test on ipad1gen and iphone4, 2012 Feb Version.
Snake, what's your test result? If not that much, I think I should re-consider if there are some configuration issue.

My current tests demonstrates the exact opposite dprat0821.

[peterfhannon]

I'm only using scaleform for the main menus so the performance is not a big issue (getting around 15-20 fps with a fairly basic scene behind, and a simple scaleform menu (albeit with many large graphics)). I'm using canvas for the hud because I need a much higher framerate for the actual game.
I need to get my game finished asap, so I'm wondering if there is anything I can do to sort out the rendering of the images, otherwise I will give up and reimplement with canvas & unrelascript.

Heres the first screen of my menu in mobile previewer :



Heres the same screen on the ipad2 :



I'd really like to know if anyone has images showing correctly with scaleform? That at least gives me some confidence I won't be wasting my time looking for something that is not set up correctly...

Thanks again,

Peter

[Solid Snake]

Snake, what's your test result? If not that much, I think I should re-consider if there are some configuration issue.

I found that when I was doing really complex UI's such as anything which required a lot of animation then my FPS would usually perform worse as compared to Scaleform. Anything which also put a lot of draw calls from the Canvas such as a mini map would also run a lot slower on the Canvas compared to Scaleform.

I've also found that the time to generate a Scaleform HUD and a Canvas HUD of similar complexity is really, really different ... that is to say, Scaleform won out by a long shot due to the Adobe Flash Professional tool set. It was also helpful to have Scaleform work on both versions of the game (PC and Mobile).

As for support, it's more or less the same as the PC support level; which I think is pretty good. I've been developing on May 2012.


Anyways, let's solve the main problem, as switching to Canvas will not necessarily solve this problem. Right, so the problem comes down to the PVRTC compression. If your memory room is pretty good, then you may be able to get away with using uncompressed textures for this. Double click on each of the textures, and set their LODGroups to VectorDisplacement. Let me know if that works.

[peterfhannon]

Thanks a million Solid Snake, that sorted it . For any other semi-newbs like myself - the setting is TC_VectorDisplacementMap of Compression Settings, and make sure you dont have force PVRTC4 set, as presumably this is overriding the other compression settings.

Cheers,

Peter

[Solid Snake]

Snake, what's your test result? If not that much, I think I should re-consider if there are some configuration issue.

So after some interesting experiments; what I've found now is that Scaleform could potentially be scaling minimum and maximum frame rates. The project I am currently working was always running on about 20-30 FPS, thus if you do a test example where the project originally ran at 60FPS then you would see a massive performance hit as FPS would drop down 20-30FPS.

However, if your game was already running within that performance bracket then there wouldn't be much of a difference at all.

But, on a further note; this is fixed completely in UDK May 2012. So perhaps this is why performance was initially so bad.

[dhow]

Hello,

I believe I am experiencing similar Scaleform performance gating type behavior. When I run up to a castle in our game without having loaded our scaleform hud, then the FPS is 60. However if I turn on the scaleform hud and run up to the castle, then my FPS is 27-30. If I am looking at no geo and have the hud on I will be at 60.

So it seems like we have some issue where if I am looking at a lot of geo AND I have the hud on, then the performance gets locked at under 30.

1. Is this what you were experiencing?

2. We are on the May UDK. Can you elaborate on how you came to the conclusion that this was completely fixed in the May release?