Old iOS Memory and reloading problem getting worse again.

Kinesia

In the past iOS would reload the app anytime you took a call or swapped out to send a message or anything. This was not on really old machines that still ran the game so seemed to be due to the new "and improved" iOS memory management.
Basically it seemed that any time the game went into the background it would immediately be garbage collected, so when you switched back it had to completely reload.

On iPhone 6 Plus I actually gave up on this being fixed and get an iPhone XS and everything  worked fine again until...
A new set! So suddenly with an influx of new art (and therefore increased memory) this started happening again.
It's still not as bad as it used to be BUT I anticipate that it will be immediately after Eldraine is released unless a fix is organised.


We can't afford quick stopgap fixes we need a longterm change in handling because there are going to keep being new sets...

So, possibilities...

1) When someone enters a game only leave loaded the assets the two players have in their decks (and the things those decks can generate), this will leave a much smaller memory print that will hopefully be able to stay loaded when people get calls and things.

2) Is there a way to say "Don't unload this app!" in some manner under iOS?

3) Can the card art be put into a particular part of memory that iOS is allowed to unload while the main app stays force loaded? (That might be confusing, I don't know how to say it properly). So if I go to look at "all cards" it starts off full of black card pictures and then quickly loads the ones showing, but when I flick to the next page I get the next lot of cards and the ones on the first paage are flagged as able to be recycled, but if I flick back and forth between those two pages it works fine and both are loaded easily, but if I go ahead ten pages and then flick back to the first it would've been unloaded and need to load again.

Instead of freezing when card art isn't there, show a blank filler and then fill it in as time allows.


In a few years time we'll have another 8 or so sets to include, so we need to plan now for a solution that will work with _infinite_ cards.


(For testing... On the iphone 6 plus to get a crash I just had to go to the card page that included every single card (use show all cards) and it would crash straight away because it would try and fail to load the art for everything. If you restricted it to standard or a single it would be fine.)

Theophilus

Well said!
This is by far my biggest frustration with this game. The game crashes on my iPhone XR just about anytime I have to do something else during a match.