Future of C2 in Mobile devices

Hi, first of all, sorry for my english, its not my native languaje.

After 2 days of changes to improve the performance on android using cocoonjs, i cant get the results that i want. I reach 40-50 fps in a nexus 7, so in slower devices will be unplayable... and i need to add more enemies/events/sprites!!

My question is, are construct2 developers working in something that improve android performance?

This is not Scirra's area to improve performance. This all comes down to WebUIView which is OS and Wrapper groups responsibility.

As an example on ios 5 ipodtouch 4g. Using the browser my game get's 15fps, using cocoonjs it get's a fantastic 60fps.

on my android acer a500 I get 20fps with the browser and either 0fps or 30fps depending on the game.

so any mobile performance imrpovement is all on CocoonJS and whatever wrapper you intend to use. Which sorta is unfortunate because it feels like CocoonJS has really dropped off on performance support :(

Thre are many things to keep in mind when designing for mobile - the devices themselves are far weaker than desktops, physics is extremely CPU intensive, you need to be mindful of overdraw (pixel fill rates on mobile is lower - I read somewhere that a lot of current devices can only draw 3x the number of pixels of the screen per 60th of a second), semi-transparent pixels take more time to calculate than fully opaque or transparent ones, limiting collision detection to the fewest needed with conditions, rotated sprites aren't as quick to draw as non-rotated sprites, previewing over lan has a lower framerate than exporting the html, etc.

If you implement some of these optimizations, there's a good chance you'll be able to get it up to 60 fps.

I love C2! Such a breeze to make games in. It's just once finished, I can't get them where they're going to be played - EXE, Android, iPhone, XNA. I'm currently planning a new game as I'm tying up a game I've been working on for the last year or so... but I think I may have to try a different engine.

Big shame, as it's harder to develop for, but in the long run I think it'll be the best choice. Hopefully by then there will be native exports, rather than additional expenses.

Hi, first of all, sorry for my english, its not my native languaje.

After 2 days of changes to improve the performance on android using cocoonjs, i cant get the results that i want. I reach 40-50 fps in a nexus 7, so in slower devices will be unplayable... and i need to add more enemies/events/sprites!!

My question is, are construct2 developers working in something that improve android performance?

You could release your game only for high end devices then you need not take care about that. Its always on android you cant support all devices etc. ..

Ok, I guess we have to step in here!

First of all, performance is and will always be one of our top priorities. We are usually forced to divert efforts away from performance improvements and into other features, but anything that could hurt performance is examined up close to make sure we're never slower than we were before.

As I'm writing this, we're giving the final touches to a time profiler system that allows us to check exactly on what sections of our code the CPU is stalled or unreasonably busy. This should help us enormously to track down performance problems.

However, just as Arima says, there are some things that are beyond our control, like hardware capabilities.

Android devices are getting quite good now, but most of the ones from 1-2 years ago have embarrassingly low specs compared to the iOS ones.

Also, the operating system itself is getting really fast now after "project butter", but Android 2.x is about as slow as you can possibly get for an OS. We've seen the same hardware going from 30 to 60 fps just because of an OS update :-

So, to sum it up, we'll keep doing our best to be as fast as physically possible. Miracles might take a bit longer to achieve ;-)