Halfgeek's Forum Posts

  • I think finer controls of memory loading of sfx or art assets is important. In this case, its to reduce the memory footprint, but also in the case of art, it will minimize stutters when a large art asset is required for the first time upon changing layouts. Preload & Unload (especially UNLOAD) should be goto for larger games, rather than asking people to use less sfx or art.

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  • 1. C2 is fine for that, there's already a good game similar to Binding of Isaac made with C2, look it up on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/262790/

    2. Why do you want to make levels on separate layers? Just make them on different layouts and when you go deeper to the next dungeon, transition to the next level/layout?

  • Its very cute, got lots of charm for the art. Will it be just eggs?

  • I use Crosswalk for Android and CJS WebView+ for iOS8+. I heard that ads slow down Crosswalk games a lot, I don't use ads so I cannot confirm.

    Phonegap is the worse options out of the three.

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    I like the top one best

    And floating text above the ships would be my choice

    Thanks Darth, I'll go with your suggestion.

  • I'm starting to wonder if Android is even worth it.

    Let's say we all woke up tomorrow to a magical universe where android performance was equal to 'native'...then what?

    You still have an ecosystem that is very difficult to commercialize due to epic-level piracy, with a user base that overwhelmingly prefers free(mium) content, of which there is boatloads.

    You still have to deal with thousands of different hardware configs, many of which don't work well to begin with.

    You still have to figure a way to rise above heaps of festering shovelware (Poo Toucher 2: The Poo Knight Rises!) that is the end result of the very 'easy access' policies that make android attractive in the first place.

    But then there are Ads...and they are so easy to implement! We all love ads...right?

    . . .

    The nail in the coffin: we don't live in a world of ponies and rainbows, and the reality of android performance is that it is all over the place, and will likely stay that way.

    Meanwhile, iOS 8 is on 70-80% of Apple devices, and from what I've read and heard, perf rocks. The marketplace is less crowded, piracy is much lower, app sizes are reasonable, and there are only a handful of very well engineered devices to design for.

    Me? I'm shopping for a Mac.

    I agree with every point you made.

    If it ends up costing you a lot in time and/or money to port to Android, just stick with iOS. All the big devs say the same thing basically, their revenue share is 80/20 or even 90/10 in favour of iOS vs Android.

    Still, the beauty of C2 (when it works) is that its very easy to port to multiple platforms. So if you build a game for mobiles, its a no-brainer to include Android! As such, an Android wrapper that is 50% to 500% faster is tremendously helpful.

  • "After that I want to do the following in the short(er) term:

    improve Ouya support (iap), as I plan to release my web games for Ouya also.

    Add font/text support. In the first place, pixi style bitmap fonts.

    Add local storage support

    add support for the most popular ad and monetisation services.

    Finish testing pixi.js and phaser.js. Try three.js as well. And by popular demand, Construct 2. C2 won't be easy because it's not open source, which means it will be harder to debug."

    This sounds like Ashley need to pitch in and help, developing for mobiles is a large reason why I got into C2 in the first place. Our situation on Android has not gotten better for a long time and lately its been horrendous.

    ps. The 50% to 500% performance improve noted by the author is akin to WKWebView on iOS8+ compared to regular WebView & Chromium. On iOS the situation is very good for performance of even mega size games.

  • Can't decide on a few UI elements:

    1. Character portrait, use bigger size one to form the background for the shields/hull bars & selection toggle (1st/top char) or smaller version like 2nd & 3rd char (place holder from first game!)?

    2. Comms chatter, should it be a text bubble from the character portraits on the side, or just floating text above their ships (Like in Fallout 1/2)?

    Thoughts?

  • Nope, I am no good with those kinds of games.

  • Optimisation: don't waste your time

    I used to optimize every event and design the logic ground up taking into account weaker & slower JS performance on mobiles.. worked wonders.

    Then I started making an even more complex game, ala. Homeworld complexity, I thought since the target is desktops, let's ignore optimizations and see what happens.. half way through combat fleet AI testing, I ran into 96% CPU use (single threaded) and it stuttered, dropping frames.

    Quickly realizing how bad it was to ignore optimizations of logic ground up, I revisited everything and put in optimizations and its been much better, at a more reasonable ~50% peak CPU usage.

    Fleet battle scenario:

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzblvP ... NseTg/view

    Draw calls takes only 5-10% of the CPU usage, the rest is pure logic.

    It is ALWAYS good practice to optimize logic, regardless of the target device. Thinking it runs 60 fps is good enough is bad because someone with a weaker machine, like notebooks, ultrabooks or older PCs will struggle.

  • Wow, what a great idea. Can't believe I never thought of that before.

    Yup, great to test positioning of objects and relative size etc:

    [attachment=0:1vqy1zs9][/attachment:1vqy1zs9]

    Also a good testing layout is the screen size for HUDs & UI, so you can see it quickly develop and its fast to readjust, finding the X/Y for where sprites need to be.

    Anyway, hopefully the crashes for OP are resolved. Good luck with it!

  • thanks a lot ashley for this realease

    really i dont believe ... with some tricks my fsp is between 58 - 60

    my cpu usage is at maximum 5 % the game is runing good even on xcode simulator

    i'm very happy

    What was it running at before?

    I've had very little performance problems with C2 and mobiles, the problem usually lay in features, such as cloud saves (Apple/Google Cloud) & a few bugs.

  • maybe its a layout without even sheet ?

    Yup. Giant layouts with no events, never called via events. It's just to set the object properties.

  • It's sad that such a large company like Google just keep breaking products, software and services.

    Not only is there jank still present, I'm using a pixelation effect, and when it activates there's super obvious screen tearing going from left to right.

    I have a Nexus 5. Their recent update (for Australia) broke my audio for phone call, ring tones and such go through the ear piece instead of main speaker and there's nothing I can do to fix it but when for them to release a new fix. Pathetic from such a huge company swimming in cash.

  • I am pretty sure I'm coding when I do a long multi-branching chain of If & If Else & Else, calling in functions and doing complex state machines for AI or plenty of other checks using raw code/maths.

    Only difference is its a heck of a lot faster than typing that out manually in raw java or C++, which I also did before so I know how awesome C2 is in time saving.

    Work harder sure, but also work smarter.