UPDATE: Managed to resolve the vertex buffer issues! The ANE was calling nonsense argument at one point which triggered OpenGL error, which demonstrated only when creating vertex / index buffer arrays in Stage3D. I won’t bother with technical details(thanks to Apple Instruments for OpenGL ES though!). Suffice to say no more Stage3D errors when recording Hungry Hero, hurray :). One step closer to the next release.
Part of resolving the issues I mentioned in the last post is testing the libraries on iPad1 as well.
I’ve tested AIR video recording with the Starling Hungry Hero game on this poor old device today and the results are (note, the first fps is the video recording fps, the second fps is the observed / measured gameplay fps while recording):
Realtime audio recording on (with sound mixer recording all the game sounds / music – this guy is eating a bit of CPU himself)
iPad1 1024 x 768 @60fps: ~30fps
iPad1 1024 x 768 @24fps: ~35fps
Realtime audio recording off (without sound mixer – you might add background music to video still)
iPad1 1024 x 768 @ 60fps: ~34fps
iPad1 1024 x 768 @24fps: ~40fps
No recording at all (audio / video)
iPad 1: ~60fps
As you can see even the video encoding takes pretty drastically like 20-30 fps off your game, the fact that it works on such a slow device as iPad1 is to me mindblowing, especially remembering the earlier results without any AIR OpenGL capturing. Pretty much it had issues even on iPad Retina with half resolution recording at 20 fps.
Also, even in the worst case it’s keeping the game pretty playable at 30fps on iPad1.
…so now “just” to get rid of these issues I discovered yesterday.
But to end on positive note – you saw I’m mentioning “realtime audio recording”? 🙂 Yes, it ALMOST works now. The only remaining issue is that the audio doesn’t want to merge with the video when the video is flipped upside down (this is a needed thing as we’re capturing from OpenGL where everything is flipped..so we need to flip back). I laughed at this one a bit, maybe the audio has nausea from all the flipping. Anyway, I think / hope this should be pretty easy to resolve. Much easier than the vertex / index buffer issue which I’m working on right now. I’m about to analyze iPad’s OpenGL hoping to see what’s going on under the hood in terms of what AIR is calling, to open that “black box” and figure out where I might be messing it up.