Few questions - game loop, data types, speed

Hello, I have a few questions after studying some topics in this forum regarding game creation:
1) What's the fastest way to wait in the game loop? I've seen two approaches:
thread.sleep(10)andsynchronized(this) { wait(10); }2) What data types shall I use? In C++ I use to prefer int over short in all cases, because 32bit hardware works faster with integers. Is this same on cell phones?
3) Speed of applications is slow. I just wonder wheter it's my fault. I was testing application, which only cleared the buffer and outputted FPS and I got around 20 frames. It was Nokia 6300 with 240x320 display. After testing on other phones I've found out that the bigger the resolution, the slower the game is going. Is this normal?
Thanks for replies...

1) You're not going to notice any really speed difference between the two code snippets. Read up on 'Threads', and you'll see why one may be used in place of the other depending on the situation. In general there may be a slight performance loss, however unnoticable, when using the synchronized version, but when you are multithreading it is likely necessary.
sleep(int) is impossible to interrupt, so it's generally a no-no in most situations. However we are talking about devices where every bit of performance helps, so as long as it works for ya, it's not a big deal.
2) The performance difference is fairly negligable, if any. The biggest thing to consider is memory requirements, and shorts take 1/2 the data.
Also, many phones don't support floating point data types, so you'll likely need to use ints/longs to calculate your values if you want to have any accuracy beyond whole numbers. Doing something like shifting bits or using 1000x values in your calculations can get around most of the problems when you can't use floats.
3) The biggest performance killers are IO, memory allocation, screen drawing; pretty much in that order. So I imagine that you are re-creating a new String object every time you output your FPS value on screen right? Doing that every frame would destroy any hopes of getting high-performance.
Just be careful, and never allocate objects when you can avoid it. anything where you concat String objects using + will cause your performance to die a horrible painful slow death. Remove anything that says 'new' from your main loop, and all String operations, and it'll likely speed things up a lot for ya.
Does your main loop have something like this?
g.drawString("FPS: " + currentFps, 0,0,Graphics.TOP | Graphics.LEFT);
This is very bad because of the String operation. It'll create a new String every frame.
If you have any more specicif questions, or you'd just like to pick the brain of a mobile game dev, stop by my messageboard:
http://attackgames.proboards84.com
Message was edited by:
hooble

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Hello Java World,
I have a few questions regarding abstract data
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>
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>
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You can use both: the information is basically the same but using time_t datatype you will loose the fractional part of seconds, which may or may not be a problem for you (apparently is not since you are already getting data using time () and are satisfied with that).
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My contributions to the Developer Zone Community
If I have helped you, why not giving me a kudos?

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Edited by: Charles Norman on Aug 8, 2008 11:43 AM

Charles,
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In the attached VI why does one loop coerce the data type while the other doesn't?

In the attached VI why does one loop coerce the data type while the other doesn't?
Solved!
Go to Solution.
Attachments:
AAA.vi ‏8 KB

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Instead of this (what it sounds like the OP is doing but returning CSV format)
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Can anyone help me to answer the question?
Explain the user-defined data types in Oracle Spatial, and give examples how these data types and their associated operations are used to support
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What is the impact of using a variant data type on performance, speed memory demands etc?

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Thank you,
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Ben Rayner
I am currently active on.. MainStream Preppers
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Solved!
Go to Solution.

A couple notes:
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What is FILEONE?
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I’m passing data values from a 3rd party system into CRMOD. Can you let me know if the below two statements are correct please?
1) WebLink data type: The value I’m passing into this field can just be of type String right?
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Thanks

Few questions - game loop, data types, speed

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