iPhone Best practices for large number of animations using UIImageView

Question

Just requesting a little advice animating images on the iphone. I\'m building an app that consists of a character with 5 animations.

Each animation consists of roughly

Answer 1

I'd recommend the movie route, if you can get away with it. It'll be cleaner and likely much more performant.

However, if you're stuck with images for some reason, here's performance from loading 5000 full-frame images in succession:

[UIImage imageWithData:...] // 44.8 seconds

[UIImage imageWithContentsOfFile:...] // 52.3 seconds

[[UIImage alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:…] // 351.8 seconds

[UIImage imageNamed:...] // hung due to caching

Answer 2

Have you tried setting the animationImages property on a UIImageView with an array of UIImages representing your frames. I have done that in the past and it worked pretty well, but I didn't have as many images as you in my animation.

If there is too much data in your images, you may have to do something more complex, like a sprite atlas. That method combines a bunch of your frames as one image and then animates the frames by changing the viewable portion of the big image. That way the whole thing loads at once and the animation just changes the part of the image that the user sees. Cocos2D has a bunch of functionality around sprite animation. If the animationImages thing doesn't work, you might want to try that.

--Mike