Monogame performance issues on iOS

Question

My friends and I are developing a game for Ipad/Iphone using the monogame Framework. We are at the final stage of the development and we are having some issues concerning the deploy of the game.

This is our first IOS game and we really need help to make this game happen.

This is our website: http://www.dumativa.com.br/index.php/pt-BR/projetos/dragon-festival (This isn't the newest version of the game but you can see what it looks like)

Since this is our first game we kinda made some mistakes we are trying to fix. Our textures were made focusing the ipad size (1024x768). We don't really know if that was the right aproach. We thought it would be better to scale them down to iphone instead of the other way around.

We need help with the following topics:

1 - The PVRTC compression.

1.1 - Is it really necessary to implement this in order to improve the game performance?

1.2 - How does transparency works with these compressed textures? We have some textures that have a transparency gradient and we wonder how is it going to look after compression.

1.3 - Do you recomend us to remake all the textures to texture atlas using "power of 2" in order to make the PVRTC compression work?

2 - ARMv7

2.1 - How does it helps to improve the game performance?

2.2 - How do we make sure that it is working after I enabled it in monodevelop?

3 - Texture Size/Resolution

3.1 - Are we right about the scaling or should we develop textures for iphone resolution and then scale them up to ipad?

3.2 - Should we have two different apps (one for iphone and one for ipad) with the same textures but with different sizes for each device?

4 - Sugestions

Do you have any sugestion or point that we are missing? We don't really know how to improve further then the topics listed above. We need every possible direction.

Basically we need to decide which way we need to go to improve our performance and playing experience. We would really apreciate your help and you wont regret once this game is launched :)!

Thank you very much.

Answer 1

The answer to most of your questions is going to be "it depends". There is no substitute for testing on an actual target device and seeing if it's acceptable or not.

I have two general suggestions: (a) make sure you have as few textures/spritesheets as possible, ideally one per scene for a 2D game. And (b) yes, I would create resized/resampled graphics for different target devices instead of relying on dynamic scaling. This is very important for non-Retina hardware like the iPad mini, where it is a terrible idea to load huge images unnecessarily. Better to have a slightly larger download up front followed by an optimal playing experience.