gles.js - a lightweight WebGL renderer for Android

[quote:2s2ot5su] if scirra would waste a year for their nonbrowserwrapper just to bring us better performance, better, well everything i think it would be worth it and they could develop a standard in between all of these other wrappers. even at the cost of employin' a few new devs to help with that. gles.js just shows us that it could be done, pretty quickly and nicely. including other features is just "useless" - you need networking - audio - graphics and maybe physics as separate thing - and you got everything you need for your 2D game.

I think this is a great idea. No one understands C2 as well as Ashley - if he could oversee the development of such a wrapper, it would make C2 independent of 3rd party software that may or may not work well with C2. Of course I'm no expert but it seems such indepence and reliability could launch C2 to the next level.

This would require a larger team. This is one of those matters where the benefits have to out weigh the negatives. For a 1 developer team. Not going to happen. However if Scirra was a 20 developer team, and the cost benefits to develop an abstraction layer, then a per platform player. Then Scirra would revist the idea. However at this time. it's not practical for such a small team.

Want to see this happen. Release some massive games that are bringing in millions of dollars. This would bring the larger and dedicated companies With such a flow of developers and income flow. Then we would see the possibility of a player. until then. not happening.

How about if he used the cocoonJS or crosswalk team - whoever was closer to pulling it off? It might be best to integrate and improve on what's already been done instead of starting from zero. I'm not a techie though. Don't understand the "under the hood" part.

We wouldn't be having this discussion or many others like it if C2 games ran flawlessly in any browser. I love C2 and feel like I'm making an awesome game with it, I'm just hoping I won't come across too many obstacles as I publish the game and move forward with it. I feel like if Ashley did take more of a part in this particular aspect, it might make the difference. That being said, I'm a father and I realize what it means to be BUSY and only have so much time in the day.

C2 is only good for simple flappy games, and prototyping.

The reliance on third party tools that don't deliver quality performance, and the constant 'wait for things to improve' is a definate no-go policy for serious game development.

All the big game devs showcased on the home page, are experiencing real issues with C2, and/or will not use C2 for large projects again.

The only way this will change (imo) is if Scirra developes a large game with their own tool, so they can experince the real issues that game devs have with this awesome - yet severely shackled - tool.

Honestly. I see similar threads in the Unity forums.

Platform X is missing B

Platform Y is too slow

Platform Z bleah

I just participate in these ones

Ludei list 22 people on their team, and yet our experience with Canvas+ is it is missing so many features that customers get angry about all the stuff it doesn't do and ask us for refunds. From our point of view, those of you asking for this are far outnumbered by those who were upset by the shortcomings of non-browser engines. Our aim is to support all the features in C2, and to do this it is necessary to develop for real browser engines.

Also, a non-browser engine is definitely not just graphics+audio+a few cherry picked features. If your game happens to run well with such a small set of features, you are in a lucky minority and I don't think you should assume therefore it will work for everyone. A commercially viable solution needs to implement a wide array of features which modern browser engines provide, and bringing that to a non-browser engine is tantamount to reinventing a modern browser engine. And how can we hope to keep up with companies like Google which have hundreds of engineers working on their browser engine?

Most criticisms people raise of platforms like Crosswalk are simply temporary bugs. They'll get fixed. Native platforms have bugs too, and they usually end up fixed as well. Everyone was crying for us to develop a new desktop exporter when NW.js had a v-sync bug. As far as I can tell, it's now fixed, and I haven't seen any other demands for a native desktop exporter since. I knew it would be fixed and I tried to explain this, but people demanded native exporters anyway. It would be crazy if we started this massive engineering project just because of a temporary bug. In the space of a year or however long it would take, any temporary issues would almost certainly be fixed. And given how fast HTML5 has developed - from no mobile support at all just a few years ago - it seems unwise to bet against this.

Everyone was crying for us to develop a new desktop exporter when NW.js had a v-sync bug. As far as I can tell, it's now fixed, and I haven't seen any other demands for a native desktop exporter since.

Aurel

sqiddster

is it true?

[quote:qrugi1ld]In the space of a year or however long it would take, any temporary issues would almost certainly be fixed.

1+ year

szymek I think that specific bug has been mostly fixed but Chrome still suffers from shocking vsync issues below 60fps. As well as NW issues that are preventing deployment to mac and linux. I think Ashley is slightly understating the third party issues.

[I will insert here that I have no experience with app development so anything I say may not apply in the mobile marketplace, where commercial-scale games can be a lot smaller and simpler]

As I've said before, If Scirra want to continue with a small number of staff then one exporter is really the way to go from their perspective. Otherwise it's a maintenance nightmare. Maintaining parallel codebases is absolutely horrible, but there's a reason GM and Unity do it.

Basically, from my perspective as a commercial developer, I can't afford to rely on so many third parties. Ashley made a valid point that you'll always be relying on third parties to some extent. However I'd rather rely on the 550 Unity employees. The difference isn't the reliance on third parties, it's who can afford to take responsibility. For example, if Unity runs badly on, say, PS4, or NVIDIA GPU's, Unity can take responsibility for that and fix it themselves. Ashley on the other hand cannot afford to take responsibility for this sort of stuff, and hence the engine is in HTML5, which takes the burden off of him and puts it on Google or whoever. The problem comes when Google or Apple or a mobile wrapper developer doesn't want to prioritize getting large-scale games to work correctly, due to the tiny portion of their userbase developing games like that.

I don't mean this as a slight to C2. It's without a doubt one of the best 2D engines out there for hobbyist/learning developers. But in my opinion it's not ready for commercial scale development due to reliance on third parties. [AGAIN, I'M TALKING PC/CONSOLES HERE] Not that it can't be done, but it can turn into a nightmare very fast when you want to release your game but for some unknown reason it janks on supercomputers, or runs horribly bad on all intel processors, or doesn't run at all on current-gen consoles.

tl;dr: HTML5 is the best choice for C2 but it means commercial PC developers will have a bad time.

I don't mean this as a slight to C2. It's without a doubt one of the best 2D engines out there for hobbyist/learning developers. But in my opinion it's not ready for commercial scale development due to reliance on third parties. [AGAIN, I'M TALKING PC/CONSOLES HERE] Not that it can't be done, but it can turn into a nightmare very fast when you want to release your game but for some unknown reason it janks on supercomputers, or runs horribly bad on all intel processors, or doesn't run at all on current-gen consoles.

tl;dr: HTML5 is the best choice for C2 but it means commercial PC developers will have a bad time.

Completely agree with this, it makes sense to stick with HTML5 for C2, but for now it's a real shame we don't get that kind of editing/development power it offers when we also need native export for desktop (at least Windows, the largest user base for gaming on PC right now) in order to reach the full user base of PC (not just people running quad core desktops and a nice GPU).

There are just too many people who see a simple retro 2D game and freak out that it doesn't run on their old Windows XP/Vista/even sometimes Windows 7 computers, because it "seems just like a Neo Geo/NES/SNES game", and then that looks bad on the game devs and in the end hurts their sales and image. In fact, we recently found that even certain applications running at the same time can screw our game up entirely (Chrome, FRAPS, other screen streaming stuff including Skype sharing, etc...).

On the other hand, it's almost a self fulfilling prophecy too if the cycle is "No big (by PC standards) games made in C2 = no evidence of C2 as a 'pro' tool = nobody buying and learning C2 to make big PC games" and so on...

Ashley

imagine this situation - tommorow crosswalk team announces that they are closing their project. what do you do? leave people off with a crosswalk that has loads of bugs / works imperfectly? switch over to some other third party software that will probably get rejected / closed in some other time? instead if you really think about

pushing your software into something that will be used over a long time, doing your own exporters / plugins is a must do (if you ask me). maybe it won't be perfect, but you have a number of developers that are "waiting" for something to get fixed by some third party, instead of relying on a software that they bought and their devs (you), thus being sure that issues will be resolved fast.

also, what i meant before - audio + multiplay + graphics + physics is all you need for a fully developed game. all wrapper needs to wrap is that. main functionality that some OS uses to run the game. all the other stuff doesn't need any wrapping / could be used as external JS (ads, social networking plugins, and so on..)

sqiddster

Thanks for update on C2 vs. desktop situation.

I think that you made a great game and it's really shame (but not your fault) that we can't play it smooth even on medium desktop computers.

Jayjay

can you imagine serious game developer explaining to his investors:

"Our game is 100% ready, but we have to wait 3-4 months for one bug fixing... maybe 6 months... but not more than 12 months... Google will do that sooner or later... they have thousands of programists... and billions of dollars... let's have hope in Google"

?

I can't

That's why I guess that 80% C2 users are just kids / will never release anything serious / learn C2 at school (C2 for education) / will do only ultra-simple stuff

and Ashley knows that. So he can wait.

And we can only beg for help from Chromium / Crosswalk / Ludei teams.

szymek

Hehe, funny you should say that, because that's almost exactly what we had to do with our game and it did cause quite a few people to lose interest

szymek

I can't answer if NW.js really fixed the jank issues. I still have to use Node Webkit 10.5 to get Steam achievements support, and a working Mac and Linux version of Penelope. Also, from my tests using Penelope, perfs are still better with 10.5 than the last NW.js, so I have no reason to update. (nearly all janks disappeared compared to nw 11, but I get a serious one each time a level start. I don't have it on 10.5)

It's waayyyy better for sure that's the crap it's been for months, but every single update feels like russian roulette to me regarding what it breaks for a multiplatform game.

So, my opinion hasn't changed: C2 is the best, smart, brilliant engine I ever tried. I will stick with it for every small project of mine in the future.

I won't use it anymore for large projects because of the size of the (fantastic) team behind it, and because html5 isn't made for large, multiplatform (steam+mobile+consoles) games yet.

Most criticisms people raise of platforms like Crosswalk are simply temporary bugs. They'll get fixed. Native platforms have bugs too, and they usually end up fixed as well. Everyone was crying for us to develop a new desktop exporter when NW.js had a v-sync bug. As far as I can tell, it's now fixed, and I haven't seen any other demands for a native desktop exporter since. I knew it would be fixed and I tried to explain this, but people demanded native exporters anyway. It would be crazy if we started this massive engineering project just because of a temporary bug. In the space of a year or however long it would take, any temporary issues would almost certainly be fixed. And given how fast HTML5 has developed - from no mobile support at all just a few years ago - it seems unwise to bet against this.

No, this is completely wrong.

Not just temporary bugs, starting this "massive engineering project" is a must if you want C2 to stand for the next year.

The problem is not related to bugs, playing HTML game inside a web browser on android system is a very big waste of CPU power and battery life, at the end the games performance is horrible.

Flappy bird clone game consumes about 70% of CPU power and makes the mobile device suffers a lot, APK size about 23 mb just for a very simple game! and runs at 35 fps ! WHY ?!!

such a game must be 2 or 3 mb maximum, consumes about 10% of CPU power and runs at 60 fps on most mobile devices.

Scirra must work on a native exporter, C2 must allow us to create more advanced games on mobile devices, i can't make 2 sprites to move smoothly on mobile device with C2 regards any optimizations to both code and images.

I'm not saying that to open fire on C2, i LOVE C2, and i LOVE making games using C2, and i tried every single program avaliable and i didn't find a single one can replace C2 even Fusion 2.5

I appreciate all your efforts making C2 an AWESOME software and it is really awesome. except for the mobile export options.

in my country we have a Proverb says: "He ruined the whole dish by 1 penny salt!"

explanation: when someone makes a perfect thing and ruined it completely by a very tiny mistake at the end. the cook is ruined because of some little salt that makes it uneatable!

Thanks