Battery drains really fast

[ekto90]

I'm not sure if its been posted before but I'm running FMH 2012 on a galaxy nexus and the game significantly drains my batteries life. A sitting of 15-20 minutes will use at least 20-30%. In addition the phone gets really really hot. I hope this is just a bug and will get addressed soon.

[Marc Vaughan]

I'm not sure if its been posted before but I'm running FMH 2012 on a galaxy nexus and the game significantly drains my batteries life. A sitting of 15-20 minutes will use at least 20-30%. In addition the phone gets really really hot. I hope this is just a bug and will get addressed soon.

I'll look into this - although battery drain is something I looked at during development and this isn't something I'd noticed on any device here.

[ekto90]

I'll look into this - although battery drain is something I looked at during development and this isn't something I'd noticed on any device here.

Thanks. I'm using a samsung galaxy nexus on 4.0.1. I hope it isn't my device :/

Also, unrelated..I'm from Melbourne, Australia

[Alari Naylor]

If you go to Settings -> Battery, what does it say is consuming the most power? One thing you could try is turning the screen brightness down slightly as this seems to have a significant effect on most of our test devices,

[ekto90]

If you go to Settings -> Battery, what does it say is consuming the most power? One thing you could try is turning the screen brightness down slightly as this seems to have a significant effect on most of our test devices,

FMH is currently on 27%, 2nd on the list and screen is on 30%. However, if I play it for longer it does go number 1 at around 30-40%. I have auto-brightness on, but I will manually lower it to see if I get any better results. Thanks for the prompt replies!

[ekto90]

An update: Even on my brightness on the lowest setting, the app still significantly drains my battery. The phone itself heats up a lot, confined to the cpu area.

[Alari Naylor]

We'll of course look into whether there's anything we can do to prolong battery life, I have to say it doesn't seem dreadful on the Galaxy Nexus we have in the QA Lab but will continue to keep an eye on it.

[Iain89]

I'm not sure if its been posted before but I'm running FMH 2012 on a galaxy nexus and the game significantly drains my batteries life. A sitting of 15-20 minutes will use at least 20-30%. In addition the phone gets really really hot. I hope this is just a bug and will get addressed soon.

My Galaxy Nexus is exactly the same the game can easily drain 75% battery in less than an hour. And my phone gets quite hot aswell round the top near the CPU area. I'm running stock android 4.0.4 hope this helps. if you need me to try anything just ask

[Marc Vaughan]

My Galaxy Nexus is exactly the same the game can easily drain 75% battery in less than an hour. And my phone gets quite hot aswell round the top near the CPU area. I'm running stock android 4.0.4 hope this helps. if you need me to try anything just ask

I've submitted some changes which might help with this recently - unfortunately the devices I have here (no Nexus) don't exhibit this issue; the change I've done should 'idle' your multi-core processor more frequently and hopefully reduce battery drain and heat somewhat; however until I get that specific device to test with this is purely a theoretical fix.

(presuming that QA don't tell me that I've fried things horribly these changes will be in the first update)

[AnthonyAquino]

I've samsung galaxy S i9000B, FM is truly a battery drainer, now that I got FM, I charge my phone twice (3 times sunday, hehe) a day... the only negative point in the game, it heats my phone after a while...

If compared to pro evolution soccer 2012, FM is more drainer too...

Maybe you could improve the game engine in future versions or updates... I will not complain much about this because its a great game, its just the first version.

[benjawi.]

Battery drainer on the Galaxy S2. Although my biggest concern is how hot the battery gets when playing it, it's ridiculous. Constantly have my screen brightness down on the lowest as well unless I'm out in the sun which isn't often as it's not very sunny down by Cornwall

[Marc Vaughan]

Battery drainer on the Galaxy S2. Although my biggest concern is how hot the battery gets when playing it, it's ridiculous. Constantly have my screen brightness down on the lowest as well unless I'm out in the sun which isn't often as it's not very sunny down by Cornwall

I use a S2 myself and recently played for over 4 hours (train from London to Norwich and back) - completed a complete season on one battery charge with 20-25% power left at the end, could you please indicate roughly how quickly your battery depletes in comparison to this?

PS - Also can you confirm that you've installed the update as this has various battery optimisations in it

[ekto90]

I created this thread a couple of weeks ago..Just an update regarding the battery problem with the new 3.4a update.

The new battery life optimisations seem to have addressed some of the problems. My galaxy nexus does not seem to get as hot as it did near the camera area. I played for about 20 mins and it used approximately 7-8% of battery. FMH 2012 is sitting at 38% and the screen is second at 32%. I'm not sure if this is supposed to be normal with this game, but nonetheless I'm happy with it at the moment.

Other than that, I am loving the new HD skin, it looks marvellous on a 4.65' display! Keep up the good work.

[benjawi.]

I use a S2 myself and recently played for over 4 hours (train from London to Norwich and back) - completed a complete season on one battery charge with 20-25% power left at the end, could you please indicate roughly how quickly your battery depletes in comparison to this?

PS - Also can you confirm that you've installed the update as this has various battery optimisations in it

Much better with the update. Can play the game without burning my hand now :-)

[Kaizen]

I've just installed 3.4 and I'll let you how it goes with the battery, which was awfully hungry before. I've to say however that my concern is that it does consume processor even when it's in the background! Galaxy s2 ics 4.0.4

[Marc Vaughan]

I've just installed 3.4 and I'll let you how it goes with the battery, which was awfully hungry before. I've to say however that my concern is that it does consume processor even when it's in the background! Galaxy s2 ics 4.0.4

The processing it does when backgrounded is incredibly minimal unless you placed the game on holiday or something similar before backgrounding it, basically there is a thread which wakes up every one fifth of a second, checks if a flag has been set and if it hasn't it goes back to sleep for 200msec (if it has then it brings everything back to life).

As such the 'draw' from the activity should be next to none.

On my Galaxy S2 I found I could play an entire season on the phone (with all normal features, ie. phone, wireless, blue tooth etc.) while listening to music and still have 25% battery power left.

[Kaizen]

The processing it does when backgrounded is incredibly minimal unless you placed the game on holiday or something similar before backgrounding it, basically there is a thread which wakes up every one fifth of a second, checks if a flag has been set and if it hasn't it goes back to sleep for 200msec (if it has then it brings everything back to life).

As such the 'draw' from the activity should be next to none.

On my Galaxy S2 I found I could play an entire season on the phone (with all normal features, ie. phone, wireless, blue tooth etc.) while listening to music and still have 25% battery power left.

Uhm regarding background consumption I am a bit skeptical because task manager show it in yellow and red and no other app or game has this percentage during background. I'll test leaving on and see what happens.
Re battery drain it depends how much time it takes to run a season but I would say that I cannot play for more than an hour without a charger in the area :-) it's weird because apart from some calculations during games or change of days, it does not seem to be a processor hungry app. My phone, instead, a gs2,gets really hot when playing.

[Kaizen]

Hi Marc.
Check these (short) videos:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/209433/video_mag_24_2012_0.mp4
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/209433/video_mag_24_2012_1.mp4
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/209433/video_mag_24_2012_2.mp4

As you can see the FHM process is always using some CPU, even when Idle. In these videos you see an average of 6/7% but sometimes it reached even 20%. On idle.
I have an app called Watchdog that "marks" when an idle app takes too much processor: yesterday I played at FHM and haven't closed and tonight, during the night, Watchdog found it using 40% of processor!
There's definitely something wrong here...

Also this morning I left home and played FHM on the bus for circa 20 mins (on and off). My battery went to 75%.