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ClickFish is now live on Google Play! :) — Gideros Forum

ClickFish is now live on Google Play! :)

Our newest release ClickFish is now live on Google Play! :)

Description:
ClickFish, how fast are you?
In this touch-based game, see how many fish you can catch in a row and build up insanely large combo-points. Kids can enjoy fishing too with cute colorful graphics and fun music. Select your favorite color of fish and get started!

Endless mode coming soon! (Sort of stress free bubble-wrap style fish clicking)

Try it FREE at: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thumbhurt.clickfish


Get it on Google Play
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Likes: gorkem, phongtt

ThumbHurt Games / FB: ThumbHurt Games / FB: Eli/Teranth | Skype: teranth37
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Comments

  • Downloading - I'll give you some feedback later
    WhiteTree Games - Home, home on the web, where the bits and bytes they do play!
    #MakeABetterGame! "Never give up, Never NEVER give up!" - Winston Churchill
  • ScouserScouser Guru
    edited June 2012
    Downloaded it and played a little bit on my tablet. There appears to be a problem. After playing for a short while it begins to stutter and the frame rate drops. When you progress and have lots of fish on the screen (score > 500,000) then the whole thing slows down to a crawl at which point it is unplayable. I closed it down, turned off my WI-FI (to stop the adverts affecting the speed) and restarted it and it was fine for a short time and then the same slow down occured. :(
  • Sounds suspiciously like a memory leak to me - are you recreating new sprites as each new fish comes on screen or do you create a pool (no pun intended) of fish (or maybe that should be a school *eek*) and reuse them as they go off screen?
    WhiteTree Games - Home, home on the web, where the bits and bytes they do play!
    #MakeABetterGame! "Never give up, Never NEVER give up!" - Winston Churchill
  • ar2rsawseenar2rsawseen Maintainer
    @techdojo, I know you say pun was not intended, but we all know it was :)
    But I agree, sounds like a memory leak
  • myspsmysps Member
    Nice! I can't wait to play with these apps!

    one question about memory leaks.. how do you know that they exist and how do you debug them normally?

    i'm a few weeks into completing my first gideros app!
  • @ar2rsawseen - D'oh you got me "hook, line and sinker" :))

    @mysps - in case's like the above (if it is a memory leak), then you'll notice things like your game slowing down or periodic lag in your gameplay when the garbage collector kicks in and try's to sort things out.

    Memory leaks are often caused by not releasing all of the references to an object (often from within a different object) so that the garbage collector can't then free up memory as it believes something's still using it.

    You can check by making repeated calls at strategic points (often at the point you move from scene to scene) to collectgarbage("count") and displaying the value returned - this will give you an indication of how much memory your using and ideally should be the same when you exit a scene as when you entered it.

    As a general rule of thumb (especially with dynamic languages like lua) it's a good idea to do as much allocation as possible at the start of your app and then re-use objects rather than re-create them.

    Debugging them can be quite hard, you have to keep an eye on what allocations you are doing and then make sure you remove all references when you've finished using them - the print() function and collectgarbage("count") are your friends here.

    I know this probably sounds trite, but you have to be able to fully read and understand EXACTLY what your code is doing so that you can walk through the code by reading it and then looking for logic errors etc - again lot's of comments in your code is a good idea.

    Again in the above example - the slowness issue *COULD* be caused by the game creating new fish with a command like fish = FishObject.new() then calling something like stage:addChild(fish), then when the fish moves off the right they *MIGHT* then just set fish = nil. At this point they've potentially lost the reference to fish and can't then easily remove it from the stage, so eventually all these lost fish are just sitting there off the screen consuming resources (they'll still need processing each frame to decide if they need drawing or not**) and slowing down the game (obviously I didn't write the app so I've no idea exactly what Teranth is doing here and this *might* be completely wrong - but it serves a point as an example).

    ** note : this is a common problem with frameworks that take a "retained" approach to rendering (where a list of each object to draw is retained by the framework) as opposed to the old-skool "direct" approach where remembering what to render is the responsibility of the programmer (the approach taken by Codea).

    Hope this helps!
    WhiteTree Games - Home, home on the web, where the bits and bytes they do play!
    #MakeABetterGame! "Never give up, Never NEVER give up!" - Winston Churchill
  • @techdojo and @Scouser, thank you for your detailed input. You are correct the system is recreating the fish objects for each new fish--while it is using textureregions and pre-loading the textures at the start of the application. I think creating the fish from a "stock pool" might be a much faster solution and would also allow me to have more limited number of fish on the screen so I can tailor it down for some modes etc.

    The game will feature a Zen Mode--basically endless fish for stress relief clicking with no scoring, but I was looking into non-timer based ways to limit the current fish on screen. (On my testing phones, I have been having a few odd results with the timers, but it may actually be the memory leak causing it with this one. )

    As well it may potentially cure my issue with the memory leak--I have had one other user mentioned that it was going sluggish on them but was unable to make my phone do it--no idea why exactly possibly my phone just has more memory/cpu and it would take too long I suppose?

    @techdojo, again thank you very much for the information on collectgarbage("count"), I was trying to find a way to get currently running stats in my application for debugging purposes and will check into that one :) Gideros is awesome but accessing information about it's LUA VM is still a bit of a mystery to me--I will learn!

    You have given me 2 good places to begin looking for the issue, since this is the first of my apps that makes a lot of use of inherited classes I will have to look over how I am accessing the 'self' object as I guess it can cause some issues when used from inside inherited classes :)

    Anyway thanks for trying the game out guys and your great input, it's invaluable to me. I will dig around the code and see if I can't find the issue and fix it ASAP

    P.S. Great puns by the way, sorry I "sunk the ship" here heh :P

    Eli
    ThumbHurt Games / FB: ThumbHurt Games / FB: Eli/Teranth | Skype: teranth37
  • TeranthTeranth Member
    edited June 2012
    Thanks for all the help guys, I was able to track down and patch up an issue related to the lua references inside one of my inherited classes--those local variables heh, which seems to have stabilized out the issue for the moment. I will be rewriting the code to use a "pool" of fish objects in the coming update. :)

    New Version has been posted on Google Play as soon as they actually update their site (1 hour or so I would guess, but who knows)
    ThumbHurt Games / FB: ThumbHurt Games / FB: Eli/Teranth | Skype: teranth37
  • Cute game. The main menu "buttons" for start, credits etc. were a bit unresponsive on my phone. Nice overall package.
  • myspsmysps Member
    awesome @techdojo!! thanks alot.. i'm now putting all of the pieces together to start as well as possible!
  • TeranthTeranth Member
    edited June 2012
    @chipster123, thanks for the input I was hearing that from some of the phones with iPod sized screens--my Droid X stretches it a bit, but the buttons worked--I am thinking I may reexport them as the entire bubble for the button--currently it is using the Text only which makes then a little hard to click and the pixel based hitTest can make it fail to click if you somehow click in the space inside of a letter heh.

    The game will be getting an update in a few days introducing a Zen mode--endless clicking, and some new obstacles to a high-score :) glad you like it and thanks again for the feedback :)

    @mysps, yeah @techdojo knows his stuff, very helpful and I would like to say thanks for your input as well you really have to love this forum great people, great software and a good time coding :)
    ThumbHurt Games / FB: ThumbHurt Games / FB: Eli/Teranth | Skype: teranth37
  • hi updated the game and there is no lag now

    also love the fish looks very cute.

    :)
  • @hgvyas123 great to hear, thanks for the input I'll let the artist know you like the fish :) I think they are quite cute too lol heh (soon there will be a shark as well, but he's not real cute heh)
    ThumbHurt Games / FB: ThumbHurt Games / FB: Eli/Teranth | Skype: teranth37
  • :-B Geek on! :-B
    WhiteTree Games - Home, home on the web, where the bits and bytes they do play!
    #MakeABetterGame! "Never give up, Never NEVER give up!" - Winston Churchill
  • @Teranth - I'd be happy to help out and give you some pointers if you want, either publicly or via PM.

    Lua has the capability to be a fantastic language to be really productive in, but it's got just a many "gotcha's" if your not 100% careful.
    WhiteTree Games - Home, home on the web, where the bits and bytes they do play!
    #MakeABetterGame! "Never give up, Never NEVER give up!" - Winston Churchill
  • I hope @Ternath accepts public pointers so we can all learn!
  • @techdojo thanks for the offer, I am still getting used to LUA for the most part my background is in PHP, C++, VB and various other languages over the years. So I might certainly take you up on that offer :)

    (It was actually the local variables in loops that messed me up last time I was looking, I had thought that they were local to the current cycle of the loop and thus throw away, but it appears they left a reference for a while anyway, lots of wasted memory.)

    @Scouser , glad to hear it :)

    Really have to love this forum!
    ThumbHurt Games / FB: ThumbHurt Games / FB: Eli/Teranth | Skype: teranth37
  • Introducing Swoosh the Squid! :) Don't click him!

    Game has been updated again heh with the first of the new baddies.
    PROMO_swoosh.png
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    ThumbHurt Games / FB: ThumbHurt Games / FB: Eli/Teranth | Skype: teranth37
  • No worries, as a general rule never declare local variables inside a loop - remember everytime a local is declared a bit of code has to run to allocate some memory and if in a nested for loop then the knock on effects can be HUGE! (but that's just standard advice for ANY language - what what goes in your loops!)

    Also be especially careful of closures which are an incredibly powerful feature if used right, but can seriously mess with your head (and your code) if you don't!

    Likes: Teranth

    WhiteTree Games - Home, home on the web, where the bits and bytes they do play!
    #MakeABetterGame! "Never give up, Never NEVER give up!" - Winston Churchill
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  • I love the squid. Makes the game a bit more hectic. When I first saw it I was just about to touch a fish and the area was hidden behind the ink. I lost 3 bubbles :(
  • ClickFish Liberty Edition is now live! Happy 4th of July Everyone! :)

    image
    Get it on Google Play
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    512 x 512 - 138K

    Likes: phongtt

    ThumbHurt Games / FB: ThumbHurt Games / FB: Eli/Teranth | Skype: teranth37
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  • image

    Watch out for Gnasher The Shark! He hates combos and will appear to try and stop skilled players! ClickFish v1.4 is now available!

    Get it on Google Play
    PROMO_shark_attack.png
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    ThumbHurt Games / FB: ThumbHurt Games / FB: Eli/Teranth | Skype: teranth37
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