Halfgeek's Forum Posts

  • Still the same for me. It's playable and I can get over the slight stutters since most of the game is smooth.

    I imagine its extremely annoying for you guys to troubleshoot since it seems to vary based on hardware heh.

  • Because its exponential, the more objects you have on screen that has behaviors or physics or anything that requires checking for collisions, the more it has to check between each iteration of the object.

    The best way is to filter out, but using instance variables and don't check for overlap or collisions until required (trigger). But it depends on the game design.

  • I think I know the cause of the micro-stuttering you are seeing in Star Nomad Elite on mobiles. Its due to aggressive garbage collection. When ships jump out of system (which happens often), the sprite is destroyed and removed from memory. Likewise for effects. WKWebView is very aggressive at GC, since I notice the memory footprint is obscenely low, ~8MB when in-flight.

    It could be eliminated if we have manual control on assets in memory. But I doubt its gonna happen, particular for wrappers like CJS.

  • This thread was originally from early 2013 and things could have changed significantly since then. Please post a .capx demonstrating the issue so I can take a look.

    It has gotten better, particularly now with a fully functional Android wrapper with plugins for monetization (XDK).. but the lacking in smoothness is still a problem, more obvious on Android and CJS Canvas+. WKWebView for iOS8 is much better but as Alatok noticed, there's still micro-stutters.

    TBH I'm happy with both iOS and Android options but it could be better, particularly Android. This Chromium jitter bug will be around for awhile for Crosswalk since they are a build behind. :/

    Alatok I think you can be confident in your purchase of C2 if you want to develop for mobiles, particularly for iOS. I have a long thread for SNE on Touch Arcade, and lots of players praise how well/smooth combat feels, no player has mentioned the micro-stutter as yet, but they do mention the major flaw of CJS's implementation of WKWebView: If the iOS device runs out of storage, you will lose your save-game due to the auto-clean clearing "temporary" files to free up storage. I put a warning in the app description, so far players have been ok knowing that.

  • [quote:3u9f2oep]@Silverforce

    I just bought Star Nomad on iOS. Cool game, nice work! But still.. there is a micro-pauses. It's not a FPS failure - FPS is fine. If you look closely you'll find these small pauses. The gameplay is not smooth For me, it does matter. This little thing can separates bad game from good game.

    Thanks! I run it on an iPad Mini 2 and iPhone 6 Plus, there's a slight pause when you bring up the star map or access menus the first time in-system (due to very aggressive garbage collector on layout changes), but in flight & combat is very smooth. Maybe I'm just not sensitive to micro-stutters.

  • — on YouTube movie I see smooth movement, on Android (even when I switched to ART) I see jumpy movement. I guess that many players think that it's the way it should be (because your game has nice, old school feeling). Anyway: how do you use WKWebView? Compile game with PhoneGap?

    What devices have you tested it on? I have Nexus 7 2013, Samsung S4 mobile, LG G-Pad 8.3 and a few others, its all pretty smooth after a short period of slight stutter on load.

    CJS WebView+ on version 2.1+ is for iOS8's WKWebView, and its smooth as you see it in the youtube video while only using 15-20% of the iPad Mini 2's CPU.

    Android's Webview is horrible so forget about it for serious games. We're stuck with Crosswalk or CJS Canvas+ for awhile yet, since Android 5 rollout is slow.

  • I re-played all the stages again, it seems to happen with some lasers and not others so I dont know if you handle them differently. 100% all the time with the laser in the intro scene after the drill pops out and fires that laser beam, 1s delay when collide. Other random lasers on stages ~0.5s delay.

    Minor random stutter is fine TBH, its not game breaking for me and if I didn't know better, I would have thought it was dynamic asset loading, which from a gamer's PoV, is acceptable. It doesn't occur often enough to impact the smooth & responsive gameplay. You did a great job with the platform movement & jump feel.

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  • szymek Star Nomad on iOS is damn smooth. Thanks to WKWebView. Minor bugs aside, its perfect in terms of performance.

    I have had zero user complaint on Android regarding stutter, only a bunch of "app crash, 1 star" from users with ancient devices that don't even meet my minimum specs. On my own devices, it stutters for the first 20-30 seconds (which is fine for some games) but after that it smooths out. It behaves differently than Chrome 38+ where the random stutter is just there all the time.

    I did have random stutter on CJS Android with Canvas+, for both Star Nomad & Ninja Girl, but I'm happier with Crosswalk for them both now.

    Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/deve ... dios&hl=en

    iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZS ... =943377727

    I think moving forward, iOS8's WKWebView is a godsend for C2 games because its just so damn fast and low memory. Android we're stuck with sub-optimal options for a long time yet.

    Edit: I did notice an improvement in smoothness when I switched my Android devices over to ART (was Dalvik). That's a good sign since Android 5+ is on ART.

  • I still get it at lower resolution like 1280 x 720 or even 640 resolution.

    I also notice a very small stutter (probably just a few frames) randomly, alongside the 0.5s stutter on collisions.

    There's no difference at 1080p (auto) to low res, the slight stutter is random, but otherwise smooth.

  • Me on the other hand, outside inconsistent framerate in the intro, had no other performance issues.

    I got worse stutter in the intro, particularly when the drill came down and spawn that laser. It was around 1s delay everytime collided with that laser.

    In-game on the levels, the stutter was about 0.5 second only, faster. It was playable but definitely not something you want in a final release.

  • I played all the stages and for me the only time Airscape stutters is when 1) collide with lasers and 2) collide with mines.

    Otherwise it was smooth as silk.

    > //Edit: This error only occurs when the .exe isn't named nw.exe

    >

    The instructions in the original post specifically call this out as a requirement:

    [quote:mtf61kwc]4. Make sure the EXE file is called nw.exe. For some reason it doesn't work if the executable file has a different name.

    It also happens when its named to nw.exe so it isn't the problem. It seems to be a rare issue as so far only a single player complaint about getting that crash error.

  • Tried the demo, gameplay is mostly smooth but there are momentary stutters for about 0.5 seconds. I noticed it occurs when there's collision with the lasers, every time.

    This isn't likely to a NW problem but I suspect the way you implemented your laser. When you play it in debug mode, do you notice a sharp spike in collision checks per second/tick at some areas? That spike could be the bottleneck for the CPU to calculate. Slower CPUs will pause for longer.

    Seems to be a rare occurrence, a user also reported the exact:

    http://steamcommunity.com/app/338830/di ... 940828803/

    Uncaught node.js Error

    Error: Access is denied.

    C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\Temp\nw6404_17767\greenworks-win32.node

    at Error (native)

    at Module.load (module.js:354:32)

    at Function.Module._load (module.js:310:12)

    at Module.require (module.js:362:17)

    at require (module.js:378:17)

    at Object.<anonymous> (C:\Users\Louis\AppData\Local\Temp\nw6404_17767\greenworks.js:13:18)

    at Module._compile (module.js:454:26)

    at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:472:10)

    at Module.load (module.js:354:32)

    at Function.Module._load (module.js:310:12)

  • imaffett

    IntelRobert

    I updated Star Nomad Elite on Android with XDK stable build (I'm assuming its Crosswalk 7) and so far everything is fine, I no longer get any Google security warnings and everything else works as it should.

    I also notice it runs a bit smoother when I run in ART mode. So far so good! Thanks guys.