Game reload

[asagm]

Can anyone give me any on advice with this..

I play on iPhone, for the last few weeks nearly every time I open the app it has to do a full reload of all the dragons, in the past I only noticed it do this once every few weeks. It?s been a real pain time wise but I?ve just noticed my data usage and it?s meant I?ve used up to 2gb of data a day playing DS. Over 30gb this month alone. Which has now run out! Is this a bug with the app or a problem with my phone? Haven?t seen any problems with other apps or games.

Any advice would be helpful, I don?t know what to do...

[Nuicakes]

I play on an iPad. Things to try:

1. There is a thread (in the bugs page?) about performance issues for Apple devices.
2. On the iPad I do a hard reboot to clear my RAM (working memory vs. ROM which is storage memory.)
3. the game has memory leaks so the usually sucks working memory and the game crashes.
4. It IS a RAM memory hog so older devices will suffer performance issues. Most Apple devices come with less RAM than other brands like Android. Your RAM is NOT listed in settings. You'll need to go online and search for the info. Drives me nuts that Apple tells you Storage memory but not working memory.

i'm bad with checking this forum and messages but send me a private message with details on your iphone and I'll look up some data.

hth

[JustKay]

What you are describing is a SSD/storage issue. You login and your island is virtually blank except for a few beginner account sprites/art, and then your phone begins to redownload all the game data again (burning up your data quota, not to mention the phone as it goes hot redlining the processor and wireless chips). This is caused by recent versions of iOS performing more space management in the background automatically. iOS used to not delete game data unless you deleted apps. My guess is after Apple was busted slowing down old phones with new iPhone releases, they decided another way to make old phones go obsolete\die quicker was to burn out the SSD by increasing read write cycles. Simply wear everything down faster. This is a pet peeve of mine. For years, Android has done space management so much better because you actually trigger an app data flush manually so you can choose when and where to cleanup.

Anyway, onto potential solutions for your predicament.
1. Don't upgrade iOS if you have the old version that doesn't auto-manage space... whoops.. too late.
2. Start clearing out space so that there is enough free space that the automatic feature never gets triggered. There are a number of ways to do this:
- newer versions of iOS have a feature that automatically suggest system data or Photos to cleanup. Give it a try... I don't think it really frees up a lot of space.
- if you are on a fairly new version of iOS, there is a feature call App Offload. You can remove the app binary/code for apps you don't use often, but keep the app data. This allows you to redownload the app when you next use it and jump in with all your logins and details preserved. I use this a lot right now. Pretty much everything is offloaded excepts apps I use everyday.
- if you trust the cloud, move most of your personal data to the iCloud to free up space on your phone (I would not recommend this as an IT expert myself)
- Remove old videos or photos you do not need on your phone (copy to a laptop for instance), or start using a different phone for data intensive use. You could aim for as close to a a DS/S8 dedicated phone as possible. There is also image and video data hiding in other apps, but you have to figure out how to clear this out for each app. Most communication apps will let you purge chat history which might clear a few MBs. Work through your old text messages and either delete them or delete messages that contain images or videos (these are also cached separately)
- Turn off automatic iOS update downloads as these can take up gigs of space. I guarantee you that if one of these gets triggered all your app data will probably get blown away at the same time. Plan your iOS updates around your gaming or skip them if the device does not need to be highly secure. You can save money by timing this update when you have access to wifi so you can reload the game data before you have to leave the house. Updated iOS will also usually take up more space.
- Reduce your game data usage. After a game data flush, you want to read in as little data as possible. I keep almost all my non-essential dragons in the stable and swap them in and out as required. This avoids loading the dragon animations until required. I've stopped buying new habitats too and am relying on just the base type habitats now when I need more capacity. Sell off any that you don't need anymore. Rotate them all the same orientation so you don't have image data for the same habitat twice. I use the filters when I access my storage to avoid loading art for storage items. If you want to go extreme, sell off all your decorations to avoid future loading of this data. Sell off any buildings you don't need anymore (coin boosters). Stop visiting other dragon islands with many dragons, as this will load in more data for dragons and decorations not on your own island. You can apply the same logic to Fantasy Forest Story, Farm Story (2), Restaurant Story (2), Bakery Story (2), Castle Story, etc.
- Just delete apps. Sacrifice a few games you no longer really play. You can even delete some standard iPhone apps now if you don't really use them (Maps, Notes, etc).
3. Keep Dragon Story open as much as you can. I believe that the system will try to target less frequently used apps for data purges. Maybe you're OCD(S) like me and this isn't a big change to your normal playing routine. This is not really an option if you play a lot of games at the same time like I do.

If anyone has found a way to turn of this feature or access better space management functionality in iOS, please share. While I've reduced the occurrence of this issue for myself, I haven't been able to eliminate it entirely.

[Paul__]

When I was having this issue, one thing I was able to do was to clear out storage on my device. Is it possible that you have low amount of free storage on your device? (You can check by going to Settings>General>iPhone Storage).