Thanks for the reply, i'll try and answer as best I can
1. I do get drops when I activate , de-activate seems less stressfull.
I've tried to minimize the amount of activations, But I do need to activate units from the pool , once they're summoned, idem for stuff like resources that you find in the level.
2. I can setup a dropbox of the project,and PM you the link, if you feel that helps?
I can see for instance on activating a unit gameobject that it allocs 0.6 mb , Its hard to figure out where that comes from , animations, scripts , hard to tell
3. I thought GC.collect was not called, but Unity3d had its own garbage collector that runs during the main thread?
additonally I see some heavy GC.collect calls after for instance a get nearest object by tag call in the profiler, If Unity3d doesn't trigger it, is it somewhere in the playmaker code? (its not in the action), and can I remove the GC.collect from playmaker. (the game's got no textures so should be fine on memory,and I can manually clean it between levels)
4. And indeed I have logics and FSM components that awake on activation, on most objects that get pooled.
can I delay the FSM awake somehow?. Or is this a matter of iterating through an object and manually activating fsm components after the parent is activated? (that would be sucky and timeconsuming, but if it works , why not)
5. I can life with the drops during object activations, as the camera is usually still when this happens, and the user's attention is focused on the gui.
But its the random drops when nothing much is happening, that is the problem, when units are just moving around, and the camera is following, nothing is spawned or done expect moving stuff around(using A* here, but that barely makes a dent in the profiler)
6. I am using some GUI, not GUIlayout(thats disabled in the playmaker gui object)
I'm using 1 guibox for subtitles, and a bunch of meshtext components , that's it. No textures in the gui except the font, (i've been through the horror of ongui before.) I could remove the subtitle box, and replace with another meshtext component, but the hickups where there before I implemented the subtitles.
For the rest I have a small fps box for development, which I regularly turn of to compare, doesn't seem to cause hickups..
phew,, lots of info. I hope it makes sense. Just let me know If you are able to look at the project If I share it? thanks for the quick response, (playmaker is awesome btw, nearly 10 years of Virtools development up my sleeve, and had not programmed in 3 years since our studio converted to unity3d. Playmaker got me right back into it. thanks)
----------notes---
the activation drop, seems to be caused by actionData.CreateAction..
Could it be that its smarter to activate all the pooled objects once on levelload, and then deactivate them? It should only need to build the fsm actions once, right? not every time you activate an object?
I'm going to hunt down that gc.collect now.