Introduction:
Hey there, my name is as it says on the left and I've decided to do some research regarding UWP's.
A group of people have run several tests on "background memory use" and we've got some interesting results out of it.
The Problem:
As people that read through this topic might already know, UWP's come with a set of restrictions.
The most concerning restriction was clearly the following: The maximum memory available to an app running in the background is 128 MB. A lot of people (including myself) immediately came to the assumption based conclusion, that this restriction would make it impossible for C2/C3 to run and result in some sort of "crash".
The Results:
As mentioned before, a group of people inside the Construct Community Discord server, came together and found out something interesting. UWP's seem to have some kind of "technique", which greatly reduces the amount of memory when you suspend the game (e.g. open the main menu).
TL;DR: In conclusion, memory use in the background is not an issue based on our test.
The
Actual Test:
The test is fairly simple. UWP's, are as the name already implies "universal" and run pretty much exactly the same on all platforms (currently Win10 + XBone).
So instead of doing assumption based complaints/accusations, we decided to do tests using an actual UWP game.
(More details about the game can be found HERE.)
Install "Crystal Brawl" on a Windows 10 machine using the Windows Marketplace for UWP's.
Run the game and measure memory use, while the game is active and suspended.
Memory Use (active): ~130mb | Memory Use (suspended): ~116kb
Visual Proof (*):
Our Conclusion:
While limited use of CPU and memory in the foreground are still fairly impactful issues, memory use in the background doesn't seem to be a problem.
Construct 2/3 games might not run with 60fps and require a lot of optimizations, it's not the fault of the engine though and rather the fault of Microsoft's deliberate hardware limitations for UWP's.
It's recommended to submit further complaints about UWP's directly to Microsoft.
We additionally recommend everyone do the test by themselves and give Crystal Brawl a play on Xbone or Windows 10!
If there are any questions regarding this left, feel free to leave reply to this post or send us a PM in Discord.
Cheers!
*provided by
skymen | ko = kilobyte