[XNA] Too Many Sprites?

This might not solve your initial problem but, try re-using none active bullets ( bullets that is offscreen ).
That way you could check if their already is an inactive bullet before you allocate a NEW one

I've never encountered this problem when I programmed my 2D game AirDefence, which was cannon game where you was supposed to shoot down enemy aircrafts. In that game I used a cannon who was going to shoot down the aircrafts. However, I never had any problems with the amount of shots fired, as the game keept "deleting" shots outside the screen.

This is actually very easy to program, and I think that this may solve your problem.

I guess that you use a List for all your shots? If so, this will be peace of cake

Start by creating a rectangle that will represent your whole "game world". I don't know if your game screen can scroll in different directions, if so, you'll have to fix so your rectangle covers the whole gameworld. If you use just a simple screen without any scroll, just set the size and position like this:


rectangle.X = 0;
rectangle.Y = 0;
rectangle.Width = 1280; // Or whatever your screen width is
rectangle.Height = 800; // Or whatever your screen height is



After that, you check if the bullets intersects with this rectangle. This also require that the bullets have a rectangle. The first step of doing this, is to loop through all bullets, then check which ones that is outside the rectangle, and finaly deleting them.


for (int i = 0; i < bulletList.Length; i++)
{
if (!bulletList.Instersects(gameworld_rectangle))
{
bulletList.RemoveAt(i);
break;
}
}



This will delete all bullets that is outside the game screen, and hopefully solve your problem. If it doesn't, just shout and we'll see if we can solve it in another way

Thanks for the advice.

@Moonkis Reusing bullets sounds good, although I plan on having bullets with various properties on them. Will see how this pans out

@falocn93 I am removing bullets that travel outside the screen dimensions, although again, C#'s garbage collection doesn't seem to be kicking in before the sprite limit is reached.

One thing I forgot to add is that I'm adding bullets in as Components. Maybe there's a certain way I have to remove them?

As Moonkis says, for particle systems you'll get substantially better performance if you pre-allocate them all and reuse the memory (bool active flags on particles). Here's a thread from a few years back that compares different methods of handling particle allocation in C#:

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/532672-allocating-particles-in-memory-at-run-time-not-slow/

The basic gist is that you can get 50% more particles on the screen at the same frame-rate if you pre-allocate particles and never delete them. If you plan on deploying to Xbox you want to minimize garbage collection as well. You need to set a ceiling on number of shots anyway...

You should only need one sprite and redraw it for each of the particles.

It's too hard to say much without you giving any code.

+1 To EJH

Also, remember that the GC is non-deterministic. You cannot guarantee when it will run.

Do you have 1700 bullets attempting to draw at the same time?

@EJH Thanks, I'll take a look at this later. Seems like an approach that could work well, although not all of these Projectiles are going to have the same behavior or sprite.

@way2lazy2care Will post some code when I get home. I'm adding the Projectiles individually as Components, and each one has its own Draw call.

@JSelf No, just 1700 total. The ones that go off the screen get removed from Components, so their Draw loops shouldn't be called anymore. When it hits 1700, I hit the Fire key and the Log says that Projectiles are being created, but I don't see any being drawn on the screen.

Thanks for the all the responses!

@EJH Thanks, I'll take a look at this later. Seems like an approach that could work well, although not all of these Projectiles are going to have the same behavior or sprite.

@way2lazy2care Will post some code when I get home. I'm adding the Projectiles individually as Components, and each one has its own Draw call.

@JSelf No, just 1700 total. The ones that go off the screen get removed from Components, so their Draw loops shouldn't be called anymore. When it hits 1700, I hit the Fire key and the Log says that Projectiles are being created, but I don't see any being drawn on the screen.

Thanks for the all the responses!

And no other errors happen beside the sprites not drawing? Have you run it in debug and checked it with breakpoints to make sure the stuff all still exists?

OK wow, this is apparently a memory issue. I waited after the shot sprites stopped drawing and then the screen started flickering and the ship disappeared. Then the whole thing crashed and I got an out of memory error. I guess things are being created faster than they're being released?

Here's a few code samples. I'm deriving most things that are drawn in the scene from a parent class called GameObject. GameObject derives from DrawableGameComponent. So, in my Game file, I just use Components.Add on whatever GameObject I want to add and add the object to an array of GameObjects to check collisions en masse (if two objects collide, they each call a function in GameObject called OnCollision). I wanted to simplify things, so everytime I add/remove a GameObject to the scene, I do it through the Game.AddObject and Game.RemoveObject (Game has a static instance so the GameObjects themselves can call these as well, mostly to properly destroy themselves).

I'm posting all the code related to creating and deleting GameObjects. I'm guessing something isn't being removed from an array or something, but I'm at a loss as to where.

Game.cs

public void AddObject(GameObject objToAdd)
{
spriteCounter++;
Console.WriteLine(spriteCounter);
gameObjects.Add(objToAdd);
Components.Add(objToAdd);
}

public void RemoveObject(GameObject objToRemove)
{
spriteCounter--;
Console.WriteLine(spriteCounter);
gameObjects.Remove(objToRemove);
Components.Remove(objToRemove);
}

GameObject.cs

public virtual void Create(GameObject toCreate, int newDrawOrder = 5)
{
toCreate.DrawOrder = newDrawOrder;
Game.instance.AddObject(toCreate);
}
public virtual void Destroy(GameObject toDestroy, bool loudDeath = true)
{
if (loudDeath)
OnDeath();
Game.instance.RemoveObject(toDestroy);
}


Added Destructors to my custom classes to see if they were being called. They weren't. I wonder why GC isn't kicking in.

Finally figured out an easy fix. Implemented IDisposable on GameObject and call Dispose() right after removing object from arrays. Probably not as elegant as a resource pool, but I can't guarantee all projectiles will be identical in the future. Regardless, my ship can now repeatedly fire 300 projectiles a second without crashing the game after any period of time (although with tremendous slowdown if firing from the bottom of the screen).

Thanks to everyone who helped, I really appreciate it. Moral of the story: IDisposable is your friend. Well, sometimes anyway.

Cool, may I ask you how you use the Console.WriteLine in your xna game? I didn't even now that it was possible, but it seems to be a great way to debug

A very easy way to use reuse resources is to make the index you want to remove unuseable (set it to null, add a flag, or whatever works for you).
At the same time, push the index to an array/list/vector that will hold all the "free" indices.
Now each time you want a new object, check first if you have a reuseable index, and if so grab it (and remove it so it wont be used again) and fill the object at that index with your data.

It sounds like the original object you are creating still has an existing reference somewhere, which is the real problem. You'll probably still run out of memory just at a much later time now that you are getting rid of most of the object's stuff.

Where do you call Create and Destroy?

Cool, may I ask you how you use the Console.WriteLine in your xna game? I didn't even now that it was possible, but it seems to be a great way to debug

Yeah, it shows up in the Output window after the startup messages finish. By default that won't show up in the editor unless the game is running, so you have to enable it if you want to check it afterwards. Can't remember off the top of my head exactly which checkbox you need to hit, but Google will give you an answer there.

@Way2Lazy2Care
For now, Destroy is only called in Projectiles when they exceed the screen's bounds. Create is mostly a fancy wrapper for Game.AddObject, so if I "Create" something from Game, I'll use AddObject instead. That said, Game calls AddObject on Ship at the start, and Ship calls Create on Projectiles to fire its weapon. Could you elaborate more on the existing reference you mention? If it's a problem, it's one I'd prefer to deal with when I'm not working on other facets of the game.

Shouldn't this be in the XNA forum?