XBOX ONE UWP performance?

ps: again

right closed visual studio and just exploring went into dev home on the xbox one (this is not the dev area but a sort of pretend version of the real xbox home) and my game was sat there like a real game, clicked on it and it and it worked, so it had been "side loaded" by visual studio.

and now that visual studio is closed and not trying to debug it all the time it is running much better

I would say 40-50 FPS on average, a little janky and has some slow down but I am thinking this is pretty much real world performance of UWP on XBOX ONE

so it is not as good as my surface pro in edge but I would say very usable for games with less going on.

ill do some more tests and stick a vid but it will be a few days , should be spending the spare time on my game rather than this.....

Note I deliberately put the flying logos in my game to push both the cpu and gpu a bit as my game is not complete.

maybe I will take the glokar or kiwi story demos and see how they fair

more ps:

totally off topic and about 5 cans in. Scirra should develop a console that just runs chrome or the best browser links straight to a website with quality controlled html/js games . cos as far as I can see all these wrappers APK or UWP or whatever they are never as good as native browser performance. The browser is the true universal platform not UWP, its just that we haven't figured out how to really monetise it yet and that's why Construct 3 concept is really quite revolutionary and I am very interested to see how it evolves...

I could be wrong....but if i recall correctly, digitalsoapbox who is the developer of Sombero, actually has some experience of getting it to run on the Xbox One's UWP platform also.

I could be wrong....but if i recall correctly, digitalsoapbox who is the developer of Sombero, actually has some experience of getting it to run on the Xbox One's UWP platform also.

Sombrero* but close enough .

C2 games with any level of complexity don't run very well on XB1, period. This includes with the limits placed on Dev mode not being in place, which you need to be accepted into IDzvb@XBox to get access to, and the limits are still somewhat lower than what's available to non-UWP tech, though even those limitations don't really explain the performance issues.

Why this is the case isn't especially relevant (so any apologists can save their typing fingers), but until things are a bit tighter engine-side - in addition to the features required by XBox games still needing to be added to Construct - so I wouldn't get your hopes up just yet, considering C2's performance track record on consoles or lack thereof. Interestingly, Unity UWP deployments, while they can also have performance issues, tend to be more related to export options than what their HTML5 tech is capable of, and it's just a matter of editing the right files after export to get the kind of performance you'd expect, considering the hardware in the console.

There is also the extreme memory limitations of a game running in the background when using Construct w/ UWP, which is very low, and considering Construct has no direct way to clear memory to get under the limit (around 128MB*), you'd be pretty limited on what you can do anyway. As in, less than you could do in a typical mobile game (where C2 performance can also be...questionable). While the memory limit is obviously not just an issue with C2, providing ways to sneak in under it certainly is.

This could obviously all change in the future, but I can't say I recommend waiting for something that *might* happen when there are tools available that can make it happen now.

*EDIT: The 128MB limit refers to what's available when a UWP app is running in the background

thanks for the insight digitalsoapbox

i dont get the 128 mb you are talking about,

MS says that UWP has access to 1 gig when real world deployed in forground mode (450MB when in dev mode)

Are you saying that we cant use more than 128 MB because construct games have to be able to handle a background mode and they cant?

cant the games just quit if not running in foreground?

[quote:362hjbtw]The maximum memory available to an app running in the foreground is 1 GB.

The maximum memory available to an app running in the background is 128 MB.

Share of 2-4 CPU cores depending on the number of apps and games running on the system.

Share of 45% of the GPU depending on the number of apps and games running on the system.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/xbox-apps/system-resource-allocation

what I dont get is that with access to even these restricted specs and running through edge in UWP then most construct 2 / 3 games should kill it...

but it seems they dont....... hmmmmm....

Scirra

Ashley

dont you think it would be prudent to remove the "export to xbox one" claim in Construct 3 advertising until plugins and everything else is in place and xbox UWP performance is validated and any limitations can be stated in a caveat against an export to xbox claim?

dont you think it would be prudent to remove the "export to xbox one" claim in Construct 3 advertising until plugins and everything else is in place and xbox UWP performance is validated and any limitations can be stated in a caveat against an export to xbox claim?

A lot of platforms would need to have some small fine print then

thanks for the insight digitalsoapbox

i dont get the 128 mb you are talking about,

MS says that UWP has access to 1 gig when real world deployed in forground mode (450MB when in dev mode)

Are you saying that we cant use more than 128 MB because construct games have to be able to handle a background mode and they cant?

cant the games just quit if not running in foreground?

[quote:12zl9hhc]The maximum memory available to an app running in the foreground is 1 GB.

The maximum memory available to an app running in the background is 128 MB.

Share of 2-4 CPU cores depending on the number of apps and games running on the system.

Share of 45% of the GPU depending on the number of apps and games running on the system.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/xbox-apps/system-resource-allocation

what I dont get is that with access to even these restricted specs and running through edge in UWP then most construct 2 / 3 games should kill it...

but it seems they dont....... hmmmmm....

Scirra

Ashley

dont you think it would be prudent to remove the "export to xbox one" claim in Construct 3 advertising until plugins and everything else is in place and xbox UWP performance is validated and any limitations can be stated in a caveat against an export to xbox claim?

The 128MB limit on apps running in the background is a big issue and, really, the biggest game stopper with the stated limitations (performance is another issue and is Construct-specific, not platform or technology-specific), based on Construct's available functionality. Saying Construct 2 OR Construct 3 can export a functional, commercially-viable game to XB1 that would be allowed on the platform by Microsoft isn't true (again, at this time). Performance issues and current UWP limitations aside, neither support the feature set required to launch a game on XB1. I hadn't even realized that claim was being made about C3 but if it is, it's false advertising. It's simply not possible at this time.

Um, that didn't answer the question of why the 128mb restriction is important, or that it should even matter, as C2 games are not designed to run in background.

Also that last part about games development is kind of interesting.

If you're interested in making things work correctly, or that sort of thing, that is.

Um, that didn't answer the question of why the 128mb restriction is important, or that it should even matter, as C2 games are not designed to run in background.

I'd imagine that because the C2/C3 games can't be forced to "release" memory when in background (no way to detect if running in background?) then you're only able to use 128MB at all times.

Running in the background is a Microsoft requirement however, as the player might go to HOME / SETTINGS / STORE / etc., which bring your app out of focus.

If Scirra hasn't addressed that in the their code, then that would be a bug that needs to be reported.

Complaining, and making accusations of false advertising doesn't do anything.

Yea. Technically it is still beta so "features may be missing" and Im sure ive seen Ashley say somewhere the live plug in is pretty much done so I think it is coming together.

To be honest I was surprised the UWP performance wasn't better but it wasn't atrocious I'm sure there are a lot of construct games that could work with it. I would very interested to see the performance boost enabled by signing up for the ID program. And This 128mb issue something that could probably be easily sorted. I'm so far away from anything like releasing on Xbox that I'm not to bothered though it is just interesting to tinker. (Wow I'm feeling positive today must be good coffee !) It sure would be nice to see Sombrero on live though. digitalsoapbox you'll have to be the trailblazer on this one... Trailblazer , now that's a blast from the past... I was pro skills at that back in the day....

I'm quite interested in seeing how this whole UWP export thing will (or will not) unfold.

If Scirra hasn't addressed that in the their code, then that would be a bug that needs to be reported.

Complaining, and making accusations of false advertising doesn't do anything.

If they're saying the plugin is ready, that doesn't seem to be the case. If they're saying games can be deployed commercially, that's untrue. Missing features is not a "bug" - it's missing features. This is not a complicated statement.

Yea. Technically it is still beta so "features may be missing" and Im sure ive seen Ashley say somewhere the live plug in is pretty much done so I think it is coming together.

To be honest I was surprised the UWP performance wasn't better but it wasn't atrocious I'm sure there are a lot of construct games that could work with it. I would very interested to see the performance boost enabled by signing up for the ID program. And This 128mb issue something that could probably be easily sorted. I'm so far away from anything like releasing on Xbox that I'm not to bothered though it is just interesting to tinker. (Wow I'm feeling positive today must be good coffee !) It sure would be nice to see Sombrero on live though. digitalsoapbox you'll have to be the trailblazer on this one... Trailblazer , now that's a blast from the past... I was pro skills at that back in the day....

There are currently no trails to blaze. It just isn't possible at this time. The 128MB issue - a requirement to deploy on the platform - is bigger than you think. That's really just a few sound files and sprites stored uncompressed in memory. Just LAUNCHING Sombrero takes about 300MB, and that's with loading most of the assets manually after start and nothing on the layout - just playing a video takes 300MB. If we had a way to reliably flush memory it may be less of an issue on startup, but memory issues aside that's still not taking into features that are required for XB1 games.

Just LAUNCHING Sombrero takes about 300MB, and that's with loading most of the assets manually after start and nothing on the layout - just playing a video takes 300MB.

I could have sworn you had a video of Sombrero running on Xbox One and it was actually running quite smoothly....or was i mistaken and it was actually running on the PC?

Edge is a great browser engine and is really high performance now. It's comparable to Chrome in the latest releases.

If XB1 is slow because of deliberate limitations by Microsoft - e.g. capping CPU usage - then there's nothing much we can do about that. It's not Construct's fault, and no other framework can get around that either, it's the XB1 OS that is capping apps that run on it. In that sense UWP apps will run exactly as well as Microsoft let them. This isn't anything to do with the performance of C2 or HTML5. It's the same thing if an app can only use 128mb RAM (which IIRC I've not seen any official reference for, would appreciate a link on that) - no other framework or technology is going to let you get around that, it's an XB1 issue, not a Construct issue. So the best people to go to about this would be Microsoft. FWIW you should already be able to detect backgrounded games (Browser plugin 'On suspended', 'On resumed', same as all other platforms), and you can try using the savegame system to do full state saves and restores to work around that too.