CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iphoneiosmemory-managementcocos2d-iphoneautomatic-ref-counting
mm24
mm24

Reputation: 9596

Cocos2d 2.x, 1.x and ARC

I had choosen Cocos2d v1.01rc instead of 2.x when starting developing my first game two months ago.

Now that I am learning more I realized that ARC is fully supported and integrated in Cocos2d 2.x and instead in v1.01rc I have to decide whether to disable or enable it (see tinytimgames post) for the entire project or just Cocos2d files.

I choose version 1.01 as I did not need OpenGL ES 2.0 features (see this comparison guide) but now that I found out that ARC is better supported in Cocos2d 2.x I feel a bit stupid as it does seem to me that Cocos2d 2.0 is the way forward for new games.

See quote: "cocos2d v2.0 is, like v1.1, ARC compliant, but doesn't uses ARC internally. But at some point, v2.0 will be migrated to ARC internally (cocos2d v2.0 uses blocks internally, but not ARC)." in cocos2d forum post (It mentions cocos2d v2.0 and not v1.x, so I assume the contribution focus of developers is on v2.0 and v1.x will have fewer people to maintain it). Is this correct? That's a big reason to use Coco2d 2.x for new projects to me!!

I started developing my game 2 months ago but I am being pretty slow as I am learning in the meanwhile and I could still be on time to move to 2.x.

Any suggestions? What should I do?

  1. disable ARC

  2. enable ARC

  3. move to Cocos2d 2.x

Thanks!

Upvotes: 1

Views: 726

Answers (2)

CodeSmile
CodeSmile

Reputation: 64477

For new users I definitely recommend using ARC (actually I recommend that to everyone).

Unless you really have to support 1st and 2nd generation devices, go for cocos2d 2.0. In this breakdown you'll find that OpenGL ES 1.1 devices market share gets smaller and smaller, and right now it's almost negligible - especially if you consider the additional development time (equals cost) necessary to test your game with even the oldest devices and possibly optimize performance for older devices.

Here are some additional points to consider choosing between cocos2d 1.x and 2.x. And of course how to enable ARC in cocos2d. And lastly, how not to bother and just start using ARC with Kobold2D (v2.0 is coming soon).

Upvotes: 3

Jonathan Ogle-Barrington
Jonathan Ogle-Barrington

Reputation: 814

In regards disabling or enabling ARC it all depends on how comfortable you feel with handling your own memory allocation and deallocation.

The only reason you might not want to use ARC is your game would only be supported by devices running iOS 5 and above, however the adoption rate seems quite high so i would not necessarily rule out using ARC

Edited

Having a look over the release notes for cocos2d v2 it seems a lot of outstanding issues have been fixed and the addition of ARC support seems beneficial as well. If i was starting out i would probably go for the latest stable version

This link should help with migrating from v1 to v2

http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/wiki/doku.php/prog_guide:migrate_to_v2.0

Upvotes: 1

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