Hi,
We are working on an app for mobile devices. And we have been testing our app on android devices until today.
The game is 120 mb on my android device after installing and running it, and even though I think that is already kinda big for the app we created, when building for iOS the game is 240 mb when freshly installed. And when the app is run 1 time, it increases to 955 mb! And we only save a small save file with 5 variables. So where is this coming from?
The app is fully created with Widgets, only objects in the world are ambient sound actors for the music and sounds. Next to that we have a persistent level that streams maps in and out.
EDIT 4-11-15:
I deleted some issues we ran into before and fixed them since, but we are still struggling with the following:
We have decreased the size of the app to 426MB on iOS with some optimization (We didn’t optimize yet, but the difference before seemed already alarming for me) But the difference between iOS and Android stays kinda big.
Still big issues with framerate on iOS.
The game runs kinda good on my HTC One M7 device, but on iOS the framerate seems to decrease drastically.
Also we tried to disable a few plugins and followed these posts for adjusting some settings but the problem remains: Setting Device Profiles | Unreal Engine Documentation
Reducing APK Package Size | Unreal Engine Documentation
EDIT 6-11-15:
We find the biggest problem for the low framerate of the app. This was solved by adding an Event end play event to every sub level which removes all widgets from the screen. Otherwise the level will be unloaded but the widgets will remain in memory. When streaming in a new level, which would all stack up on each other. Somehow this was a bigger problem on iOS then Android, but Android had problems with it too after a while.
Still the size of the apps is different on Android or iOS, but the strange part is that the Cooker statistics seem to show the same amount of MB for both Android and iOS, but when the game is installed on the devices Android is still showing a total data of 129MB on the storage. And iOS is now 380MB. Maybe Android compresses differently in the final build?
Also we would like to know: Streaming in a new level sometimes takes a couple of seconds (4-10). I think its depending on the amount of images/borders/texts etc in the widget that is loaded with the level. We tried to hide as much as possible in the designer of the widget, and only set images/texts etc visible when needed. But the loading still is a kinda slow on mobile in my opinion. Is there some way maybe to speed this up? Setting images hidden doesn’t seem to work but maybe there is another option?
As you can see we fixed most of the problems already, but feedback/tips on this latest problems would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks