Halfgeek's Forum Posts

  • Great work there! Good choice not going for Early Access, as most players who check the game in early stage usually do not come back even if the final version is much better. My game is still far from final version and I'm now in a strange situation where I'm limiting the marketing as much as possible to gather players when the full version is available

    But nevertheless, having a community during the alpha helped me so much with feedback, bug hunting, ideas and critique!

    Guess you had a group of testers during the alpha phase, didn't you? It is really mandatory!

    Congratulation for the imminent release, fingers crossed!

    You make a great point, EA is risky for games that are far from finished, regardless of what people like to think, first impressions do last.

    But at this point, I'm just guessing like most of you guys here on whats right or wrong or the best way to go about being a gamedev. I haven't got success yet. I don't even have a C2 business license (because Desura stole a lot of my earnings!!).

    I hope to buy the C2 business license soon though.

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  • Danwood

    piszozo

    gumshoe2029

    spongehammer

    C-7

    jobel

    Colludium

    Thanks guys.

    I wanted to let you all know, quite a few beta testers have played it already and they all had excellent performance. They said combat was very smooth and fluid and some of them even ran on Intel HD4000 laptops, which in NW10.5, was a disaster. So a good side-effect of the v8 engine in recent Chromium that's used in 13 alpha 6/7, is better optimizations for crap intel graphics!

    This is a huge deal for all C2 devs who export to PC. Prior, even simple games with a few webgl effects would run like crap on Intel integrated graphics.

    Also, holy cow, I wasn't expecting that RPS coverage!! I just do the normal thing looking at traffic to my blog this morning when waking up, and today it went to the moon.

    Also RPS tend not to cover very niche indie titles so I wasn't expecting it.

    But all I did was fire off an email, with a link to the Steam store and a key to invite them to try it. So I guess the author tried it and liked it.

  • Congratulations! Did you use NW v 13 alpha in the end?

    Yup, 13 alpha 7.

    Only one that was smooth and remains smooth without a memory leak for hours on end.

  • Chrome is is updated to fix the issues.

    NW is still using very outdated Chromium builds that are plagued with problems. The latest NW 0.13 alpha 6 and 7 are on recent Chromium.

  • You are describing that jank and stutter behavior that is well known for NW in recent times.

    The 0.13 alpha 6 and 7 are excellent so far for performance, smoothness. There's still some minor things that needs to be smoothed out but it will be fine.

    Danwood has good results with his epic survival game as well as other testers.

  • Just went live on Steam!

    http://store.steampowered.com/app/414950

    With trading cards (pretty quick and simple to do, no plugin required), achievements and cloud sync (very easy to do, no plugin required).

  • Did it fix by removing all the build in the depot and starting fresh?

  • That's very strange. I just uploaded my builds with alpha 6 and 7 which works fine from Steam.

    I suspect there may be a conflict with your current build on Steam, because Steam does a checksum for any changes and it patches those individual files and not everything. Perhaps look into how to disable that feature and just update all files?

  • Try adding the the args --data_path="" to set a folder for storage, or the user data path args.

    See if it works.

  • Wouldn't the solution in that situation be simply to export without updating NW.JS?

    Yes, if the current NW is functional, no bugs etc, we'll just stick with it like we stuck with 10.5 for so long despite its memory leak problem.

    But then we will miss out on performance enhancements, compatibility etc as HTML5 is an evolving platform. Just be cautious that Google can and do mess up software updates.

  • I was in the same boat, I mostly test features I coded, without long play through sessions until I got all the features done, then came balance and bug hunt play testing.. after 1 hour, it lagged badly. It was game-breaking. Which led me to investigate more and it was due to the Chromium memory leaks (fixed in 0.13 alpha 6+).

    NW12 also suffer from vsync issues, after 15-30 minutes a lot of people reported stutter or jank. Very disruptive to games.

  • Colludium

    Don't you notice after a longer play session, your game start to stutter and lag with NW 12?

    Try it, play for an hour or two non-stop.

  • Apparently, NW 0.13 alpha 7 fixed the issue for me

    http://dl.nwjs.io/live-build/11-26-2015 ... .0-alpha7/

    Nice!

  • tgeorgemihai

    Oh yeah, HTML5 is extremely fast on Safari, without needing a bloated wrapper as well so app-size is whatever your game is. It's a nice situation for iOS definitely.

    Android 5+ gets this performance improvement as well as not needing a wrapper since its on more recent system webview Chromium. It's ~25% of the Android market now. In a sense, publishing to Android 5+ is a good idea since it limits old crap generic devices crashing on your games and users leaving a 1 star review "crashed". I'm biased against Android though, I just don't see it as a platform that's friendly for small time indies breaking through. iOS and Steam for example, show newly released games based on date. Android doesn't, it only has "Top New" lists which requires marketing grunt to get onto, else nobody will find your app.

    So currently the big wrapper is only needed on mobiles with older Android versions & PC, which isn't that big a deal.

    With NW improved on memory management and working vsync, C2 is good even for bigger games. I just hope the situation remains good and improves. We do not want major chromium bugs to neuter C2 for months on end ever again. That's the biggest risk with C2, hoping that Google doesn't accidentally break your games.

  • Danwood

    Make custom ones. Never have those weird issues again.