Ludei's answers to your questions

So, as promised, at GDC last week I took some of your questions from this thread and went to the Ludei booth and asked them.

None of this is guaranteed to be true, I took notes, but I may have misremembered some facts, or been given incorrect information.

My first impressions of the Ludei people was that they seemed very tired and overworked - that could have been just the fact that they'd been running the GDC booth, but I was also told quite a few times that they are 'very busy'.

Advanced Web Audio

Apparently this is something that's extremely difficult to implement with their system, and they didn't give me any timeline for that.

WebRTC support

No plans for this any time soon.

OUYA support

They had an OUYA at the booth running a cocoonJS game, but they said they haven't yet implemented microtransactions.

Text rendering

Apparently text rendering is extremely expensive the way they do it, and you'll either have to stick to updating text very infrequently, or use spritefonts.

Support and features for the C2 plugin

So this may be some good news - they are preparing to open source the C2 plugin and turn it over to the community. Should be a little while as they said they need to do a lot of internal testing but it's almost there.

Not responding to contact, request, etc

This was just a 'we're very busy' response, talking about the amount of users they are trying to deal with, etc.

Memory management

This one was interesting. Apparently C2 is the only engine they have trouble with in this manner, and they have quite a few problems with the C2 implementation of memory management. They are convinced that C2 is doing this wrong, and making it difficult for them to do anything. Nevertheless, they did say that they had some workarounds in the works.

Hope this gives you guys some information.

In the end, it will be mutually beneficial for Scirra and Ludei to work together to fix these problems. It will definitely translate into many more users for both.

Thanks for reporting back! and a big congrats on getting your game greenlit!

Thank you very much for doing this and sharing the answers! Would be very, very cool to work around the memory management thing.

Also, congrats on the green light

Thanks sqiddster

Ludei has many employees and that means they're desperate for being more funded. Maybe that's why they look so overworked. It's sorry that they're doing poor communication with communities, but I wish they came to bring something cool back soon.

The big question will be what is IN version 2.0 (confirmed by them at GDC to be the next release ). If the bug fixes will occur in that release. When that release will occur, etc.

Well, I asked the release date of the new C2 plugin to Ludei, complaining about their not being punctual, you know, like "It will be live soon" and no news for a month. They said they are working in the last fixes, probably will be ready in days.

and you'll either have to stick to updating text very infrequently

I know webfonts doesn't work and spritefonts didn't have a good result for me.

Could you please elaborate on that? I am struggling a while now to make my custom fonts working, on my Android game.

Thanks

— basically, updating text is horrendously expensive with their implementation, takes like 40ms or something. So, as soon as you are updating one text per tick, even if you are doing nothing else, you are down to 25 fps.

So you have two options:

-Use text, but don't update it often

-Use spritefonts

Wow, thanks for doing this...I hope we see some amazing updates soon!!

"Memory management

This one was interesting. Apparently C2 is the only engine they have trouble with in this manner, and they have quite a few problems with the C2 implementation of memory management. They are convinced that C2 is doing this wrong, and making it difficult for them to do anything. Nevertheless, they did say that they had some workarounds in the works."

I just wanted to address this. As to why this is so.

The standard form of memory management is to just release any reference to a variable. This allows for JS engine to garbage collect and clear out the memory. However by letting an automated GC run often produces the in game stutter effect; as often GC is done in batches. To get around stuttering and to better efficient memory use to reduce slow down from memory allocation or deallocation; Ashley implemente a custom objects holder. That way when an object isn't needed any more it sits in back for when it's needed again. Thus no slow down for destroying and creating new objects. The GC is avoided and performance remains pretty steady. An element you wouldn't get if we used auto GC. If you wanted steady performance you would as the developer(not C2/Ashley) would need pre-allocate all your objects and never destroy them during the course of the level and manage them yourself.... more annoying than you want to really delve into.

Ok. So Ashley implemented an advanced memory manager. However the memory manager requires JS selected memory deallocation commands like "delete". This is because most of C2 plugins run on prototype objects and delete is better fore removing them. So let's see what they do in the next while.

Hmm ... Come to think of it ... I was looking in my intel XDK to learn a bit more of what comes out when I published my (almost finished) game and I came across (while checking the C2 js file that it gave me 800+ "errors" (which I'm certain they were warnings) about a __proto__ property being deprecated... which rose a few flags for me but since the thing is working fine I'm not giving it much thought.

Is it something I should be worried about at all? It's probably because of when C2 was made and how it was made since scripts are being replaced with faster "better" scripts all the time maybe there's some catching up still pending.

That aside... I'm still torn between using crosswalk and cocoonjs ... I've solved some issues pertaining my game's performance however I would like to put adds and leader-boards and basically use the social stuff too... as much as crosswalk publishing is giving me awesome performance Ludei's option opens up the door for me to get all the social stuff working(to a point)

I'm between a cocoon and a crosswalk (OK that's a really lame joke). I'm waiting to see if they get their plugin updated too I haven't seen any news on that so far.