PlayStation Mobile Studio

[rjubber]

Just a quick question - is anybody else finding the simulator really slow? I understand that emulating an entirely different chipset on a pc won't always give great results, and that this is a beta - but simulators of other platforms in competing dev environments seem to be faster (eg Android, Marmalade etc). Its not the speed that's the biggest issue so much as the wavering performance. I've got just one sprite moving across the screen, and it's progress is very uneven. Sort of stop-start in places. Perhaps the simulator needs to demand higher priority (something I'll experiment with in Task Manager)

PC - Windows 7 64-bit, ATI 5870 graphics, 18Gb of ram, SSD storage, latest drivers, i7 quad-core.

Cheers,

Robin Jubber

[MartinCaine]

Personally I think the simulator performs pretty well. If anything in my own tests it's much faster than any of the actual devices (Vita runs dreadfully slow under the current VM in my own games). I also don't think it does any 'emulating' as it just runs through a Mono VM so will be running the x86 VM on a Windows PC and should be just as fast as running any other .NET program.

Oh, and the PCs I'm using are of similar spec to yours, a 2010 iMac and a 2011 Mac Book Pro (Windows 7 through BootCamp).

[rjubber]

Thanks for the information Martin - perhaps I've just got this PC set up incorrectly - or the simulator is competing with some other resources.If anybody has experienced poor or choppy performance from the simulator, perhaps they can share some pointers on improving it. If not I'll just live with it for now and see if I can get my hands on some hardware. I have an HTC One X, but it doesn't yet seem to be supported by the IDE.

Good to know about the VM stuff too.

Cheers,

Robin.

[MartinCaine]

Would you mind sharing your solution files so I can test on my own PC? I can also test on devices as I have a few PlayStation Certified devices available for testing.

[rjubber]

Hi Martin - since I posted I've added a lot of code to my little engine - and it's not yet working again. I'll send you a copy when it is running properly, with fps and so forth - would be very interested in seeing what results you get on different platforms.

Regarding the simulator - I've discovered that a lot of problems with it occur when core 0 is being used elsewhere. For instance my desktop background (across 5 monitors, so quite a large image) is updated every 10 seconds. Normally this doesn't affect performance and my cpu monitor suggests only a slight bump - but it hurts the simulator momentarily. I think this is where my main performance issue was arising. Other little cpu hiccups, for instance MSN or Skype streaming yet another pointless advert to their main pages or Chrome updating a flash box also seem to have an affect.

I think the simulator is pretty decent as you suggest - I've recently added multiple animating sprites to my simple sprite engine and performance is good with lots on screen - just very strongly affected by external processes.

Cheers,

Robin Jubber

[MartinCaine]

Glad you identified what might be causing your issues. I tend to do most of my testing on actual devices since I have them handy and deploying to the Tablet S is generally pretty fast too