blekdar's Forum Posts

  • Yes...? Sort of, the game is built for 16:9 (with a resolution of 144x256) but there's an event in the loading screens to adjust the playable area to fit the device it's being played on.

    What's strange is that if I use canvas +, there's no artifacts what-so-ever, but the performance tanks, cause I have to use high-dpi. I've tried to use canvas + with high dpi turned off but the screen just multiplies itself

  • Hey peeps,

    So I'm working on porting Blitz Breaker to android, and have been having some odd issues with running the game fullscreen on my devices. Some of the sprites (it's mostly my tile maps and sprite fonts) glitch out and don't render properly when using webview or crosswalk. This is what it's been looking like:

    But when using the exact same settings, but not running the game in full screen it looks correct, which is this:

    Any reason why this would be happening?

    Information for further analysis:

    Full Screen Mode: Letterbox scale

    High DPI: No (switching to high dpi doesn't fix the issue)

    Point Filtering

    Web GL: On

    Fullscreen Scaling: High

    Downscaling: Low quality (changing this has no impact)

    Pixel Rounding: Off (changing this has no impact either)

    Thanks for anyone who has any answers/tips!

    NOTE: When using canvas+ I can fix this issue, but I have to use High DPI (if I don't then the screen doesn't scale properly), which completely tarnishes the performance (I'm noticing hiccups on my xperia x performance and galaxy s6, which shouldn't have any)

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  • Funny you mention this, I actually have received some xbox one dev kits already, and was wondering how I go about implementing such features. I was going to attempt forcing it through visual studio + the windows store achievements, but this would make it a whole lot easier.

  • part12studios Well it's been made with mobile in mind for a while, the PC version was just an alternate path, and just so happened to come out first.

    Since I was testing it in the browser more often than not towards the end I figured it would be ok, and I accept that this is mostly my fault for not testing native apps as opposed to the phone's browser.

    And yeah my plan is to start stripping features until I get the cpu lowered, it's just a pain to strip things, compile, upload to a wrapper, load onto device, etc so I was seeing if there were any known plugins or behaviours that would run great in my iphone's browser but shoot up to super high cpu usage when wrapped.

    Just to clarify and compared CPU usage:

    PC usage: 10-15%

    Mobile Safari on iPhone 6 : 40%

    Wrapped through intel xdk: 80%-90%

    Wrapped through cocoon.io: 95%+

    So naturally I find it odd that my phone's browser handles it so much better, and cocoon handles it so poorly. It does play great and runs at 55fps+, but the battery use and heat is pretty brutal. I'll do some experimentation and see what I can find out. Thanks guys!

  • — So given that, cocoon.io isn't any more efficient than normal uiwebview? When I use the profiler through mobile safari, it's roughly at 40% usage, with nothing sticking out particularly high ratio wise to the PC version.

    I'll happily take this to another thread, but I just am curious as to if cocoon doesn't handle certain things as well as uiwebview / safari, as they have both been running better than cocoon's canvas+

  • Haven't gotten an answer on the cocoon boards so lemme ask it here too:

    Heyo, so I'm trying to figure out where I need to optimize my game, and have run into a bottleneck when it comes to CPU usage, which I find a little odd.

    I'When running the game through my iphone 6's safari browser, it averages out at about 40-50% cpu usage, and normal battery usage. When running the game through canvas+, the cpu usage is constantly 95% and higher, and battery usage is crazy high. On top of that it makes the device uncomfortably hot, but I suppose that is from the cpu, which explains the battery drain.

    Of interesting note when I export the game using normal uiwebview, while the CPU usage is still high (80-90%), the battery usage is normal, and the heat minimal.

    So I guess what I'm asking is that are there any reasons I should be on the lookout for when it comes to such high cpu usage, especially when Safari runs it so well?

    Thanks for the help!

  • Alright, thanks for the reply ASHLEY. Since there isn't an ETA, I'll try and figure out the performance issues on cocoon.io (it's almost good to go an iPhone 6, but it takes up A LOT of cpu), since I can get audio working properly on that.

    I appreciate your time, cheers.

  • damjancd I haven't used phonegap too much, but when I had wkwebview set up through intelXDK I noticed the performance was wayyyy better with my game (60fps without any optimization). I've since managed to get canvasplus plus running smooth on an iphone 6, since their audio engine is far superior, but man does the device get hot + drain the battery super fast.

    I can probably say if phonegap / wkwebview is crashing it's due to loading too many sounds. Loading your audio files from the sounds folder using webview causes them to be decompressed as .wavs in the device's memory, which takes up a very large amount of memory. Once an iOS app takes up too much memory the OS's response is to close the app, so that's probably why it happens. Canvasplus does not do this as it uses a different audio engine (that supports .ogg at that), but I find the performance is lacking comparatively.

  • Hey Ashley, not to badger but I'm just wondering if you've given any thought into memory management solutions? I'm currently talking to a few publishers for mobile and would like to figure out if I should wait to get wkwebview working properly or if I should go all in on cocoon.io (which has worse performance but better audio atm).

    So I want to see if you're considering adding it in a future update, as I would love to see that

    Thanks!

  • xmnboy any chance to get in on this beta? I'd love to do a bit of testing with my game.

  • Ashley I've tried something similar. This was all done when they were in the sound folder, with preload sounds set to off.

    At first I tried loading all the music tracks on boot up. That failed, caused a crash.

    Then I tried splitting up the preloading between the first 3 layouts. That failed, caused a crash.

    Then I tried only preloading music when it was needed. That worked...for about the first 1/4 tracks. After that you could tell it was starting to bog everything down by having it all loaded into the memory, and eventually yes, caused a crash.

    It's worth mentioning that Blitz uses roughly 20 music tracks. 14 of them are rather long, and definitely the ones causing issues. That being said if I could load/unload them 1 at a time I could make it work as these are the tracks that load in game, as opposed to during the menus.

    I've tried many many solutions, and will continue to experiment. I don't want to make your life harder, but as it stands it's hindering me releasing Blitz on iOS (probably android too, but one thing at a time). As it stands I may just attempt to optimize the living hell out of it to get it running smoothly on cocoon.io, as the canvas+ webview fully supports preloading the music via the music folder (and uses .ogg as well, for what it's worth), but man it's a tiny bit frustrating to be so close and yet so far. I hope you understand!

  • Ashley so the only method using webview and to ensure smooth music playback is to load it all into sound and go from there? The only issue with that though is it causes the app to crash after roughly 1/3 of the music is loaded. I gather that it decompresses them as .wav files, as the actual .m4a files only take a total of 20mb after export.

    Am I missing any steps to reduce the music footprint, or is there a method of offloading what has been preloaded to prevent crashes? Thank you!

  • Ashley Yes I'm aware that is the current work around. Unfortunately for me that won't work since the amount of music Blitz has causes the game to crash when it loads roughly half of the tracks, so it's not a viable work around. This will happen regardless whether or not I load them at the start of the game or try to stagger it with loading them throughout the game, since there is no method of unloading the tracks that aren't being used.

    I do find it interesting that cocooon.io's canvasplus is able to preload music and play it reliably. I gather that it doesn't rely on apple's webview so it's able to get around some of it's limitations. The unfortunate part is that canvasplus' performance doesn't match wkwebview's, which has been stellar performance from a mobile stand point. I realize I could fix this with some heavy optimizing, but it's super frustrating that one option has the performance, while the other has correctly working music.

    matrixreal This is interesting, is there a method to detect if a music file has been successfully preloaded?

  • Yes I couldn't help but noticing this after uploading the full game.

    Back to the experimenting page, gonna play around and see what results I get with wkwebview, as that's where the performance is at.

    May post a bug report here too, to help get ashley's attention.

  • mrmeteor Thanks, I'll probably do a little post mortem after I launch the mobile builds. I mean the game hasn't been exactly earth shattering in terms of sales, but I can't complain at the units + reaction.

    In terms of reaching customers, I try to post regularly on twitter + tumblr shots / videos of my game, gets some people asking questions + builds interest. About a month before hand I set up an account at dodistribute.com to sort of filter a bunch of the key requests I got into one place, then proceeded to send an insane amount of keys to press / streamers / youtubers with some success here and there.

    The best benefit about the steam version is that it's given me wayyyy more feedback than I have gotten previously, and has gotten quite a bit more hype looking forward to the mobile version, so I'm curious as to whether or not I can capitalize on that. I'll probably write about that afterwards, if there's anything worth writing

    Were there any specific questions you had about the steam process?