How to efficiently show many Images? (iPhone programming)

Question

In my application I needed something like a particle system so I did the following:

While the application initializes I load a UIImage

laserImage = [         


        

Answer 1

I'd recommend starting over using OpenGL ES, there is an excellent framework called cocos2d for iPhone that can make this type of programming very easy and fast. From a quick look at your code, you're lasers can be remodeled as CCSprite which is an easy way to move images around a scene among many other things.

Answer 2

Seems like you're trying to code a game by using the UIKit API, which is not really very suitable for this kind of purpose. You are expending the device's resources whenever you allocate a UIView, which incurs slowdowns because object creation is costly. You might be able to obtain the performance you want by dropping to CoreAnimation though, which is really good at drawing hundreds of images in a limited time frame, although it would still be much better if you used OpenGL or an engine like Cocos2d.

Answer 3

As jeff7 and FenderMostro said, you're using the high-level API (UIKit), and you'd have better performance using the lower APIs, either CoreAnimation or OpenGL. (cocos2d is built on top of OpenGL)

• Your best option would be to use CALayers instead of UIImageViews, get a CGImageRef from your UIImage and set it as the contents for these layers.

• Also, you might want to keep a pool of CALayers and reuse them by hiding/showing as necessary. 60 CALayers of 17*1 pixels is not much, I've been doing it with hundreds of them without needing extra optimization.

This way, the images will already be decompressed and available in video memory. When using UIKit, everything goes through the CPU, not to mention the creation of UIViews which are pretty heavy objects.

Answer 4

The UIImageView is made to display single OR multiple images. So, instead of creating every time a UIImageView, you should consider creating a new image and add it to the UIImageView instead.

See here.