Sprites, Atlases and memory management

[Dajuice]

I'll start off by telling you I'd find it normal and not rude at all if you don't answer this but since I don't know where to begin, I'm taking as many paths as possible to get my answers.

I've been making my first unity game for almost 5 months now and you did a great job guiding me through hardships, thanks.
But now I've discovered that (on IOS at least) the profiler is completely irrelevant, or that I'm doing something very wrong, I'm asking you this to make sure I'm not doing something wrong.
The game we're making is really texture heavy (we have over 30 jam packed atlases, most of 'em 1024x1024), at the title screen, the unity profiler tells me it uses about 20MB, the Instruments profiler tells me 90MB. What I understand from that, is that the unity profiler hides the textures that are currently used but not on screen from the memory profiler. This means that the unity profiler tells me that only the title screen is in memory and my other textures are somehow compressed, ready to be used, but in fact my whole UI is loaded with all it's textures fully uncompressed.

So this is it, is there some mojo I must do in order to make the iOS behave just as the unity profiler tells me it behaves, or must I manually manage all those atlases?

[unikronsoftware]

How do you load these unused atlases?
Do you have references to these in your game?

[Dajuice]

They are in the scene, my situation is much like the one from this post http://unikronsoftware.com/2dtoolkit/forum/index.php/topic,1129.msg5377.html#msg5377.
I'm loading my UI scene and accessing it and all, but when I was profiling with unity it told me that everything was fine and all was finely handled (when I see the title screen, the textures memory takes the space of my title atlas, when I am in my shop, the texture memory takes only the space of my shop atlases and so on...) but it seems that no.  so I guess I'll have to make my memory management for this, I think I have an idea: serialize and destroy the sprite components when they are hidden, then re-add them to next shown assets when making a page to page transition.

I know that in your previous post, you advised to load all the UI then only take what's important then dump everything else, but I feel like much of the loading time would be a waste of load unused and delete unused assets... So you think it could be done my way?

[Dajuice]

Further research on how to do what I want to do led me to this topic: http://unikronsoftware.com/2dtoolkit/forum/index.php/topic,1058.msg5098.html#msg5098
this has been really helpful, but you told the poster "But, if all you want is to load sprite collections dynamically, you don't need to do this. I'll reply to your email soon with more details about that, just held up with some stuff right now. It does work." And I believe that the content of this email replay is the answer I need.

[Dajuice]

haha, okay I'm sorry for the unnessessary reading.. I'll just say that I found the docs about Loadable asset and now I'm theorically able to load collections... BUT... when I press the loadable asset check box, it loads a little bit, then the box remains unchecked, and I'm still unable to load the collection with :

Code: [Select]

tk2dSpriteCollectionData col = tk2dSystem.LoadResourceByGUID<tk2dSpriteCollectionData>(colName);

[unikronsoftware]

You should be able to use "Loadable assets", it isn't a public part of the toolkit, but it does indeed work. What version of tk2d are you running? There was an issue in older versions where manually creating loadable assets didn't work properly.

[Dajuice]

hmm... I'm a little screwed as I was using clipped sprites, now they're an incompatibility hive.. I'll try to repair the lost connections.

[Dajuice]

ok, I shouldn't post before even trying, done, it is just your new way to access Collections from outer classes that was giving me those error messages

[Dajuice]

And now I'm stuck just a little further: The checkbox checks, I have the loadable asset path/name, but when I try to access it with the command line, it returns nothing, before it was Null, now it is nothing.. Here is a picture that explains what I did, is there anything I did wrong?http://d.pr/i/opay

[Dajuice]

And yet again, I find 3 minutes to late... but this time I,ve been misled! In your doc http://www.unikronsoftware.com/2dtoolkit/doc/reference/sprite_collection.html
you use tk2dSystem.LoadResourceByGUID<tk2dSpriteCollectionData>, but it seems to work fine using tk2dSystem.LoadResourceByName<tk2dSpriteCollectionData>, maybe you would want to update the docs? I know I'm a hell of a fool proof test, but ... there is no but, just thanks.

[unikronsoftware]

Yup I should update the docs
That is a typo on my part. Sorry for the confusion.

[unikronsoftware]

Updated the docs.

[Grebenots]

Is there any functionality to unload a sprite collection/atlas manually?

[unikronsoftware]

There will be a explicit way to unload a specific sprite collection in 2D Toolkit 2.0.

For now, if you destroy all sprites using the sprite collection, and then do Resources.UnloadUnusedAssets(); that should unload all unused spritecollections.

[Grebenots]

In my case, I have just 1 sprite that is being used to display one of the 300 or so tiles(from 6 or so collections).  Would changing this sprite's collection and spriteid, then unloading the unused assets, work the same way?