My cocos2d-iphone game has tiled maps. The tilesets textures are rather big. I got around 5 tilesets and each one is 2048×2048 (retina).
My maps are around 80×80. They have around 8 layers and each one is obviously using one tileset.
The frame rate falls (it goes around 30 sometimes. I know 30 is rather aceptable, but still, I want 50+).
So given that textures are huge I can’t afford to make many layers (since each one loads a texture of these).
So how about I divide my tileset textures into much smaller tilesets (like 1024×1024 each)? That will allow me to use many more layers for my maps, right?
Are there any other tips for huge retina display tile maps?
Texture with 2048×2048 and 32-Bit colors equals 16 MB (!) of memory. Five times that is 80 MB of memory just for the textures. Ouch! For a tilemap that is relatively tiny (80×80) that’s an enormous amount of texture memory.
First order of optimization would be to use PVR textures if you really can’t reduce the number of tilesets or images within them. You lose some image quality but the memory consumption will go down dramatically, and the rendering performance of PVR textures is a lot better. Of course while working with Tiled you’ll have to use the (presumably) PNG texture which you then convert to PVR for use in the project, for example using TexturePacker.
8 tile layers can be pretty hefty, but depends on how you use them and how many tiles of each layer are actually drawn. Try this: set all but one layer to visible = NO. Then turn the layers back on one by one and see how that affects the framerate.
Finally you should know that Cocos2D’s tilemap implementation is utterly inefficient past a certain number of tiles. There have been attempts to improve the tilemap renderer, for example this one (HKTMXTiledMap) may be worth giving a shot.