My game has characters that get shot. They can die in a variety of poses, so a generic death animation is hard and i’ll probably need quite a few different death animations.
Alternatively i could use rag doll physics on the character when they die. Traditionally rag doll stuff is usually pretty expensive even on a desktop machine. Has anyone done any performance timing on the iPhone for this? My characters have about 12 bones currently.
I was in the exact same boat, tried ragdolls but decided against them becasue of the frame rate hit. If you’ve only got one or maybe two characters you may be able to get away with it; I suggest you experiment and see.
In my game (not sent to Apple yet - in a week or two I’m hoping :)) I found that one character was more or less OK but two was a bit much. I had potentially up to ten characters, and that was simply out of the question. I don’t have exact performance metrics other than “eyeballing it”.
EDIT: I do use the frame rate script so I know numerically how things are going as well as watching the game, but I don’t have any recorded data I can chart and share.
I use a randomization routine now to select from an array of four animations for the character falls, works fine. In fact, it actually looks a little better since all my “deaths” are on a flat plane with no other objects to interact with.
If there are unkown situations in your game, like the possibility of characters falling down stairs or slumping on furniture or something like that then ragdolls would be great if you can take the performance hit.
HTH