Halfgeek's Forum Posts

  • russpuppy, interesting, i don't know what might be happening with some games though, but your game runs really clean. I've tryed a bunch of games made in construct in play store and there wasn't any which didn't glitched or something like that.

    At least on my phone device.

    What's your device?

    My C2 games on Android run really smooth on a phone from 2010.

  • Forgotten Legendz - Top-Down Dungeon Adventure/RPG. TEST #5 - ShadowCaster & WebGL; Doors, Traps, Animations of characters; PathFinder:

    Excellent, it looks polished and very professional!

  • Just delay game start or logic for 5s .. show a "Stage 1" text then fade it out. Then game starts and players can move/do stuff etc.

    You can do this with a global variable, GameStart = 0, then On Start of Layout => Wait 5s, Set GameStart = 1 etc. Your player commands require GameStart = 1 to trigger.

  • Mobile GPUs these days aren't that weak, an example is a Snapdragon 800, it compares well to intel GPUs in notebooks U models with HD4000 and AMD APU such as A6/8 in notebooks. Those notebook chips (I've tested via Chrome on a windows 8 ativ smart pro with i5 CPU) actually run WebGL shaders fine. There is something else going on there.

    For comparison purposes: http://www.futuremark.com/hardware/mobile

    As we can see, new mobile SoCs is catching up pretty fast to intel ultrabook level.

  • sylva1n

    If its on an older iPad or 4S, if you hit 200mb memory use, the app can close since it generally only have that much free out of the 512mb of ram. Spikes doubling vram even temporary is a no-no for mobiles.

  • — - what's the performance difference between canvas2d and webgl and can you share a .capx demonstrating that? Is it the same across iPhone models (4S, 5...) and iPad?

    I've only tested on 4S, dont have other Apple devices.

    https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... free&hl=en

    On Android (with CJS) this simple shooter runs flawless on devices from 2010, HTC Incredible with a 1ghz old dual core. On iOS with Ejecta or CJS it lags everytime there's explosions with particles (which happen frequently!), while it doesn't lag with WebGL disabled. Do you have an email (PM) I can send the CAPX to?

    Edit: Since we're on this topic, is there a technical reason why WebGL shaders are just horrible on mobiles? I mean take a look at this: https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... mes.xcomeu

    Awesome game runs very smooth on my Snapdragon S600 device (equivalent to Nexus 7). Surely, a few fancy shader effects should be OK but sadly its not. 10 glowing tiny sprites = lag fest. Or 2-3 warp sprites = lag fest.

    is it NOT GPU accelerated and all processed on the CPU only? I can't see another reason for it, these newer SoCs have a lot of GPU grunt.

  • No WebGl shaders used, I know to avoid them for mobiles, but my games have a lot of particles, which run fine with Android with WebGL enabled even on older devices.

  • Well, this is disappointing... I changed every text to either an image or sprite fonts, and all the "every tick" to a setter. I made a ton of "performance efficiency" upgrades on my program... and the amazing result; about 3% increase in performance xD

    Hopefully slower devices will make it more noticeable.

    The game sure looks prettier now, after with the graphics overhaul

    That 3% of your CPU, if its an Intel i5 or i7, is MASSIVE when it comes to mobiles.

    I tell you from my own experience, having my games using an average 20% of my i5-3570K will lag older devices with Tegra 3, but if its using 15% of my i5, Tegra 3 devices will hold a 40-50 fps on it, perfectly playable. It's ONLY 5%, but 5% of my i5 is like 25-30% of the total processing power of that quad core Tegra 3.

    Optimizations matter when we're dealing with a power constrained platform. Even IF your game is running at 60 fps on newer devices which you target for, optimizing it means the device would run it more efficient and thus generate less heat or consume less battery, something users on mobiles appreciate.

    Contrary to Ashley, for mobile development, with HTML5 already losing 50-60% of performance compared to native code, my mantra is to optimize it as much as possible.

  • You cannot run with WebGL on iOS, performance is neutered (half the performance in my tests and other peoples results) because Apple in their blindness refuses to adopt standards.

    The point is, if memory management only functions with WebGL active and not with canvas2d, its rather pointless for iOS apps.

    Android = always use WebGL

    iOS = canvas2d only

    It's messed up.

  • How's the new plugin?

    I'm about to finish a project and I'm still figuring out if I should use Cocoon or Ejecta...

    Try Ejecta first if you cannot get it to work or features you want, then use Cocoon.

    Ejecta already handles loading and memory much better than CJS, which takes ages to load and eats up heaps of ram for bigger games.

  • As a beginner making games for mobiles is hard. So take your time to learn it. There's a good tutorial series coming from ArcadeEd that covers all the stuff you need.

    Otherwise its a matter of searching for the tutorials and asking on the forum for help.

    Mobiles have been a 2nd priority for C2 for a long time but its come to a point where its great for desktop and its time for the focus to shift to mobiles, which it has.

  • I was using r163 and the debugger on its default inspect view would clog my CPU at around 45% and the game was stuttery. If i switch it to Profile or Watch mode, it comes down to 15-16%.

    Also, I just then updated to r168 stable release and the debugger in inspect view suddenly work really smooth down to 15-16%.

    But, on Profile/Watch mode, my game drop down to 12-13%.. so it looks like a 20% performance gains from r163 -> r168! Great job Scirra.

  • I've played other games with leaderboards that did not require any permissions outside of Network access (for Ads and communication with Google).

  • I don't really have an issue with it. A few of my CJS games have over 50,000 installs and I have never had one complaint about the permissions. Maybe they just don't install it so they can't review?

    I just installed my app and here are the permissions.

    Read Phone Status and Identity

    Approximate Location (this is for location based ads)

    Modify or delete contents on your usb storage

    Find accounts on the device (google play services)

    Full Network access (ads)

    View Network Connections

    Prevent Tablet From Sleeping.

    None of those seem over the top to me.

    Your first point is exactly that, they WONT install it at all if they see ridiculous permissions.

    These are what the permissions can do, not that you do it, but these permissions allow malicious apps to do funky stuff.

    * Modify or delete contents on usb storage = full file access including root access. This is a dangerous permission and gets a warning from newer Android versions.

    * Location = tracking, also a dangerous permission as malicious apps will know where you are. This permission alone means your app can never be set for "Everyone" and has to have at least "low maturity" flag. It's not suitable for kids if there are parents who use apps or google rating guidelines to block installs.

    * Read phone status and ID = access to full history of web usage, calls, msg. Completely insane to have on games that have no right to go there.

    * Find accounts = access to your contacts list.

    Also, a Reddit thread on the AndroidGaming sub with that many upvotes I will take that very seriously. Generally a popular topic with agreement tend to have around 20-60 positive votes. This one has over 350, to put it in perspective.

    I've seen apps with ridiculous permissions when its not required get accused of being an NSA backdoor... no quicker way to crash and burn with your app than have that associated with it.

    My Intel XDK game has 1 permission, Network. It doesn't need Modify or delete contents permission, doesn't need Storage permission to read contents off the phone and usb. Webstorage saving DOES NOT need that permission to function.

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  • Inspect in debugger is not indicative of your final performance (it even lags my PC), you run it with profile or watch and thats the realistic indicator.

    For me since I make mobile games, I aim to have my games not use more than ~15% of my i5-3570K, which results in very good performance on a wide range of devices.