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 = [UIImage imageNamed:@"laser.png"];

UIImage *laserImage is declared in the Interface of my Controller. Now every time I need a new particle this code makes one:

// add new Laserimage
UIImageView *newLaser = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:laserImage];
[newLaser setTag:[model.lasers count]-9];
[newLaser setBounds:CGRectMake(0, 0, 17, 1)];
[newLaser setOpaque:YES];
[self.view addSubview:newLaser];
[newLaser release];

Please notice that the images are only 17px * 1px small and model.lasers is a internal array to do all the calculating seperated from graphical output. So in my main drawing loop I set all the UIImageView's positions to the calculated positions in my model.lasers array:

for (int i = 0; i < [model.lasers count]; i++) {
    [[self.view viewWithTag:i+10] setCenter:[[model.lasers objectAtIndex:i] pos]];
}

I incremented the tags by 10 because the default is 0 and I don't want to move all the views with the default tag.

So the animation looks fine with about 10 - 20 images but really gets slow when working with about 60 images. So my question is: Is there any way to optimize this without starting over in OpenGl ES?

Answer 1

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 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.