HieuLsw / iphonefrotz

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Extreme delays in Counterfeit Monkey #235

Closed GoogleCodeExporter closed 8 years ago

GoogleCodeExporter commented 8 years ago
What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Load the game 'Counterfeit Monkey'
2. Get past the introduction.
3. Go north, then east.

What is the expected output or behavior?  What do you see instead?
Relatively prompt feedback from the parser is expected.
Instead, delays of up to 30 seconds can occur after most inputs.
(It isn't so bad near the start of the game, but as the game progresses it gets 
worse and worse.)

What version of Frotz are you using?
1.6

What device model are you using
iPhone 5, iPad 2 (the problem is worse on the iPad 2, but still clearly 
noticeable on the iPhone 5).

What version of iOS?  6.1, 7.0, etc.)
7.1.2

Please provide any additional information below.
The problem is greatly compounded when using the 'go to' command, as it 
combines the delay of all the rooms that the character is moving between. I 
once set my iPad down and came back four minutes later to find that the next 
prompt still has not arrived. (It always arrives eventually, though.)

Original issue reported on code.google.com by omgitsra...@gmail.com on 21 Jul 2014 at 3:12

GoogleCodeExporter commented 8 years ago
Unfortunately, there's nothing I can really do about this. The game is a bit 
slow even on a desktop computer; people mentioned (complained about) this when 
it was first released/reviewed.
It's just doing lots of path finding and other expensive computation whenever 
you move.
Frotz is already using a highly optimized glulx interpreter based (git).  I 
could probably spend a few days in a profile and eek out another 10%, but 
there's just really not any way to speed it up by the orders of magnitude it 
would take to make a big difference (besides actually JIT-compiling it to 
machine code, and that's explicitly disallowed by App Store policy).

Fortunately, Apple seems to be about doubling the speed of their hardware every 
year, so this problem will gradually fix itself; it's already not that bad on 
an iPhone 5S or iPad Retina/Air.

Original comment by spath...@gmail.com on 21 Jul 2014 at 4:11