Halfgeek's Forum Posts

  • —

    Thanks again for the info; you do seem to be one of the go-to's around here for mobile info

    To be more specific, my specs are: Snapdragon 200 series model 8210, dual core ARMv7 1.2ghz, with an Adreno 305 GPU 400MHZ, 1GB LPDDR2.

    I know it's a lower end device to test with; however, I'd like my games to be playable on a platform like this, even if it means dialing down settings/obj count.

    Planning on getting a tablet soon, something not too insanely expensive (<$250) or powerful, but with decent performance.

    It will definitely be playable, you will just need to not use WebGL shaders, don't use the Physics behavior with many objects (or not at all) and keep the collision/overlap checks per tic as low as possible. These are the major limiting factors to performance on mobiles. While it sounds like a major sacrifice, its up to you to design a game around those limitations if you want to target low end devices.

    I hear some good things with Android L, let's hope it boosts performance a fair bit.

  • szymek

    XDK has improved a lot over time. I find performance to be identical to CJS Canvas+ and actually smoother on my own devices. But given how widely different each Android device are, who knows.

    I test it on S3, S4, Nexus 5 etc.

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  • > So, what kind of performance should I expect on a low-med powered device? Specifically, 1.2ghz dual core, android kitkat 4.4.2, 800x480, antutu score of ~13,000?

    >

    > Have tried a couple of my own projects, as well as some of the scirra templates (space blaster and ghost shooter). Framerates aren't that great, ghost shooter rain demo get's about 10-12fps, space blaster maybe 20-30fps (just a guess, have to re-export with fps meter). Ghost shooter reports webgl.

    >

    —

    That's about spot on. Ghost Shooter Rain demo is actually very heavy due number of sprites involve & shaders. If you want to make something like that, definitely aim at much beefier devices. Typically 800 x 480 res devices are junk and will not run complex C2 games well.

    Also on Android its not useful to quote dual-core, quad-core etc because the performance difference between the types of CPUs/GPU differ vastly. For example, you can get very cheap devices with quad core but its nowhere near the performance of a Samsung S4 or similar devices. So for Android, I prefer to aim at certain popular models and use that as the cut-off/minimum required target.

    For me, the Samsung S3 is the minimum target.

  • szymek Nope, it works fine for me in r185. I never had NW jitters, but again I don't always update to the latest C2 build unless I know its safe to do so.

    It did jitter in Chrome preview, but that was resolved via the latest Chrome update.

  • well, in case of C2 this message could look like:

    "We would like to release our game on PC, however our game jitters even on computers playing FarCry 4 1080p 60 fps. So we have to wait just a few months for better Node-Webkit."

    It's not that bad. But it does require you to troubleshoot, use an older Node-Webkit (and seriously where the hell is the basic option to include icon files & instead of defaulting to the generic NW icon?!) that works etc.

    I've never been more happy with C2 than in recent times. With top performance on iOS, decent performance & features on Android and still great performance on PC/MAC... Sadly, Linux is still broken though! But at least NW guys are aware and hopefully they will fix the dependency on the outdated libaries.

    But that letter itself, they should have gone onboard with Unity since it can export to all platforms. Sure its expensive, but they are a big studio with millions of $ in revenue, they can afford it. I mean its just silly to keep each platform on a different code base when there's clearly functional options.

    Look at Hearthstone from Blizzard. Built with Unity. On PC/MAC, iOS & Android.

  • Ejecta is now outdated, it's slower than the default WebView (Safari) in iOS8+.

    Ludei's WebView+ is even faster by many folds since it uses the enhanced WKWebView. It'll run your game exactly like your top end PC. Quite amazing in fact.

  • Set preload sounds in C2 project properties.

    Also queue a preload action in the events just in case, on start of stage or level, preload the sounds you need. So when it plays, its instant, otherwise the first time a sound is played, it has to retrieve it causing a 0.5s delay.

  • Its a strange problem since Crosswalk even though its behind Chrome in build, a few builds ago it was still running fine. Contact Intel_Roberts in the XDK thread and maybe submit your CAPX to the guys at Intel for them to troubleshoot, they are very helpful.

  • — Thanks! Hope you enjoy it.

    hazneliel

    TiAm

    It seems to be a WKWebView problem since I never encountered it for other exporters. So it could potentially be an Apple problem where their WKWebView generated files are flagged temporary & thus, safe to clean for storage space. I have to wait for ludei's response and see what they think the problem is. If its Apple, then probably it will be fixed in the next iOS update.

  • Does this affect the Canvas+ apps also?

    I'm not sure, but I read iOS8's auto-clean is allowed to go after temporary generated files or browser generated files when space is low.

    I already have 2 users leaving me a 1 star rating cos they lost their save, that's AFTER I put a warning in the app description that they should not be very low or out of storage space else their auto save won't work. People just don't read app descriptions these days!

  • I'm not sure there's anything we can do about this from the C2 engine, the WKWebView still looks just like a browser. I think it's up to whoever provides the build system that uses WKWebView. I'm assuming it has some kind of API to mark files as permanent? Or if not maybe Apple need to add support for that - I've read WKWebView has a few bugs and missing features compared to the old web view.

    Thanks for the clarification. Hopefully ludei can look into it also.

  • mercy

    You don't need to be afraid your game gets pirated. It's not a new thing to be worried about and certainly should not factor in how you design your game to "remedy" it.

    Never assume that piracy loses you $, but those pirates aren't types who would spend $ on games anyway. It's not lost earning, since they aren't your customers.

    Make the best game you can for your real customers.

  • Well it's not flagged, because it's deleted, losing save game progress.

    I'm going to cop a shit storm for Star Nomad Elite on iOS due to this.. lots of iDevices often run low on storage due to no external microSD options.

    I posted it to ludei troubleshooting site too, since I don't know where the problem occurs, C2's WebStorage plugin or CJS WebView+ implementation of extra generated files.

    Edit: IF and when Phonegap implements WKWebView, they would also need to be wary of this issue.

  • From my reading, files generated can be flagged to avoid the auto-cleaning process of iOS. Without this flag, the system is free to randomly delete stuff when you are low on storage space.

  • It seems like a massive oversight, but on WKWebView local storage using the WebStorage plugin (or even Save) is prone to be removed by iOS8's default auto-cleaning process if the device runs out of storage space.

    The files generated NEED to be special flagged to ensure iOS8 skip it when it checks for things to delete (temporary webfiles, browsing cache, files generated by apps).