Rable's Forum Posts

  • So !

    I did the following :

    1) Remove the music form the sound Folder and put it back in music.

    2) Put "Preload sounds" to no

    3) Put "use loader layout" to "no" and put my title screen as the first layout (instead of the loader layout)

    4) Build using XDK Beta version instead of stable

    And I didn't notice much amelioration...

    Loading the game for the first time I had :

    • 6 seconds black screen
    • Splash screen during 2 seconds
    • 30 seconds black screen
    • 3 seconds default loading bar

    When starting the game again I had :

    • 2 seconds splash screen
    • 22 seconds black screen

    My game is still crashing, but I'm now able to play 5/6 level before it crashes.

    I'm unable to use the inspect tab of google at the moment, but I doubt there is any connection going on. My game doesn't ask such things and I'm using mostly default options in XDK.

  • I tried this morning to set "preload sounds" to "no", and it doesn't quite fix the thing. It's maybe a bit better though, but I still have the long black screen.

    6bruno6

    Thanks for the tip. I never tried setting "loader layout" to "no" up to now, but my loader layout is quite light : one animated sprite with the loading bar on a white screen. I hardly see how it could take many time to load, but I'll try it anyway.

    j0schi

    Indeed, I load the music of my title screen as a sound, in order to be able to preload it, and launch it as soon as the title screen is visible. I was hoping that it would load during the loader layout, but I'll try to put it back to the music folder.

    I'll post the results of my tests here, and share any improvements on the loading times.

    Thanks !

  • Thanks a lot, Ashley and Aphrodite.

    Seems like the problems have or will have a solution, which is reassuring.

    1) I'll dig deeper into this offline Phonegap build. Glad there is a workaround.

    2) I builded the project yesterday evening and the APK was still crashing. But it's true it was through "stable" XDK and I didn't look for the Crosswalk version. I'll check these.

    3) Indeed, I have audio preloading activated, I'll try switching it off. But aren't the sounds preloaded during the preload screen? If not, setting the preload option to "No" and preloading the sounds manually during the loading screen could do the job, right?

  • Hi Everyone,

    In the last few weeks, I tried very hard to export my project to both Android and iOS with very mitigated success. I've encountered many problems that I didn't see referenced anywhere on this site/forum. Some of them are really hard to deal with, and most of them are probably due to the size of my project.

    However I never heard anyone saying that it could be problematic to export big projects with Construct 2. Well, from what I've experimented so far, it is. Here are the main problems :

    1) Phonegap Build upload is limited to 40 Mb maximum zip files. This is not referenced in the official "How to export to mobile with Phonegap" tutorial. When I first encountered this problem, my project was already 50Mb heavy, and far from being finished. Now after 2 weeks of optimizations I'm under the 40Mb limit, but I still have to add graphics in my game, so the struggle is not over. Is there any workaround with this issue?

    2) At the moment, an Intel XDK bug makes Crosswalk export on Android bug if they contain more than 250 images... Well... 250 images is what some people on the project told here :

    (remove the _ in the link)

    https_://crosswalk-project.org/jira/browse/XWALK-2655 (delete "_" as I'm not able to post links)

    But at the moment I reduced the number of image in my project from 270 to less than 220, and the bug is still here. What I call "the bug" is the app crashing as soon as the game begin, so it can't be published. I know from IntelRobert that the staff is actively working on this problem, but if it's not fixed very soon I will be unable to publish to android via XDK.

    3) The loading time of th APK of my project exported with XDK/Crosswalk is also very problematic. Here is how my game launches :

    • My custom splash screen for about 2 seconds.
    • A completely black screen for about 30 seconds ! (most users will be gone)
    • The Construct 2 default loading screen (little blue bar) for about 5/10 seconds
    • THEN, finally, my (very light) customized loading screen for about 2 seconds (!!!!!!!)

    This loading time seems to repeat itself each time I start the APK, not only the first time.

    For reference, the Android export has been tested on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3, 7"

    Thanks in advance for any help/comment/advice !

  • Hi,

    I'm encoutering big performance problem in my game project, and I guess this thread covers the reason why. As my game has much different needs than what is discussed here, I'll drop a few lines to explain it, as it may be useful.

    My (mobile) game basically resumes itself to "touching a sprite makes this sprite spawn another object (which is animated) and modifies its instance variables". Pretty simple, but I'm using lots of sprites, which are pretty big, and uses a lot of opacity (full range from 0% to 100%, sqiddster said it was very GPU demanding). There are no moving sprites, no collision, no effects, and the fastest animation plays at 10 frames per second. So basically a FPS of 10 could be enough for me.

    But when I touch an object multiple times quickly when performance is low (it is always low on rather slow devices), each animation is delayed. The result is that if I touch 10 times quickly, then I have to wait sometimes 3 seconds or more for every animations to be finished, and of course instance variables modification only happens when the corresponding animation starts playing, which ruins my gameplay.

    On slow devices, FPS may drop below 20.

    Is there anything I can do besides removing graphics (unthinkable)?

  • Hi everyone,

    I'm encountering a problem with Phonegap export : When I click the "Upload a .zip file" button in PhoneGap Build, I can then select the zip file I just created (from all the files in the exported folder), then I'm back at the previous screen and... nothing happens. Just like I clicked the cancel button...

    I tried it two times with small, test projects, and it's working fine. Is there any reason why my big project (47Mb) would not upload to PhoneGap while small ones do?

    Thanks for your help !

    EDIT : After the upload failed, if I click on "private", it shows the following message : "File is too large. File must be less than 40 MB. "

    Any idea if it is possible to upload files that are less than 40Mb size?

    As I plan to use Phonegap only for iOS 8, are there ways to reduce the exported file's size, such as removing either the .OGG or the .M4A sounds?

    Thanks for your help !

  • Hi everyone,

    My game basically resumes itself to "touching a sprite makes this sprite spawn another object (which is animated) and modifies its instance variables". Pretty simple, but I'm using lots of sprites, so performance is not always very good. I can live with that but my main problem is that when I touch an object multiple times quickly when performance is low, each animation is delayed and performs just like a moving object without dt.

    The result is that if I touch 10 times quickly, then I have to wait sometimes 3 seconds or more for every animations to be finished, and of course instance variables modification only happens when the corresponding animation starts playing, which ruins my gameplay. What I would like to do is that when performance is low, every animation that has been triggered plays as soons as possible, even if it means 5 or more animations playing together.

    I tried to add dt in the "speed" animation property of my spawned object, but it doesn't work... It can only contain numbers.

    To be more complete, when clicking on an object, another "main" object also play an animation and a very short (0.05 second) "wait" action triggers before the touch could be perform again. But "wait" actions already have dt included, right?

    Any idea how I could resolve this problem?

    Thanks !

  • Use the scirra.com/manual/129/image-format Image Format dialog.

    Thank you Ashley, didn't knew about that. Much appreciated !

  • Hi,

    I'm currently trying to lower the size of my project. While checking the image folder after exporting for Android via Crosswalk, I discovered that all my JPEG images, that I carefully compressed in order to be good-looking but not too heavy, are now PNG images. And obviously, they are now around 500Kb each, while they were less to 100Kb beforehand...

    These are large, 100% opacity sprites, so I don't need PNG format for them. Is there any way that I could avoid C2 to turn them to the PNG format?

    I put the option "PNG compression" to none, but it still makes (uncompressed) PNG with all of my files. :-/

    And I have a sub-question : What does exactly the "Brute (very slow)" option under PNG compression in the export window? I tried it, and unlike what I expected, the image folder is still heavier with this option checked.

    Thanks !

  • Hi IntelRobert,

    I'm not a C2 gourou either, but I can tell you that C2 *somewhat* creates sprite sheets automatically when exporting for crosswalk. By somewhat I mean that many sprites are gathered together on sprite sheets automatically, but there are most of the time only 4 sprites per sheet. Sometimes up to 10 or even a little bit more but it's rare. FYI most of the sprites in my game have a 384x384 pixel canvas, so they are not small. But even much smaller sprites (like impacts) are often not placed at all on spritesheets, just 1 per file... So I'll investigate to see if I could create these spritesheets myself in a more radical way.

    Thanks !

    Showing my ignorance about C2: Is there a way to combine multiple images into a sprite sheet so you don't need to load so many?

    > Thanks a lot for the infos. Then I just have to wait and pray for them to fix the bug... or your solution to to work. Actually I have at the moment only about 2/3 of the total images loaded in my project, so it will feature still more images when the game will be finished... (not even speaking about the music)

    > It would be a pity to discard drawings I already drawn because they are too heavy to export...

    >

  • Thanks a lot for the infos. Then I just have to wait and pray for them to fix the bug... or your solution to to work. Actually I have at the moment only about 2/3 of the total images loaded in my project, so it will feature still more images when the game will be finished... (not even speaking about the music)

    It would be a pity to discard drawings I already drawn because they are too heavy to export...

  • Thanks a lot, Knifegrinder !

    At least I know that this is a know bug and that there could be solutions in the future. Indeed, my project has lots of images. And as 99% of the game happens on only one layout (exept title screen and maybe one other), most images are present on that "game" layout. I'll give a look to beufreecasse tool that you're speaking about, but maybe a simple solution would be to create a "container" layout that contains all the images and is never played? The "game" layout just need a handful of images to play each level, so I'll just create the needed object at the beginning of each level.

    Could this work? Or do the bug occur because there are lots of images in the whole project, regardless of the fact that they are all placed on a layout that is never played? I guess I'll try it anyway.

    Thanks again !

  • Hi,

    I just finished reading the 59 pages of this thread to be able to resolve my problems. The first one seems to be a known XDK bug, but I will still explain it here.

    My bug seems to be similar to this one : https_://crosswalk-project.org/jira/browse/XWALK-2655 (delete "_" as I'm not able to post links)

    My game runs perfectly while previewing over wifi on Chrome for Android, on my two devices : Samsung Galaxy Young GT-S6310N and Samsung Galaxy Tab3.

    In the emulator of XDK, it works fine.

    When exporting with Crosswalk for Android, then playing the APK on the devices :

    1) On the tablet, I can see the title screen, then it crashes most of the time. I'm back on the menu screen of the tablet, then if I check the running apps, I can still see my app running there. When I click on it, I'm back to the C2's loading screen, which sometimes freezes, or it either crashes the game again, or succeed to launch the game.

    2) On the mobile phone it's the same, except that I'm not sure the game started even once. It crashes nearly always.

    I tried XDK beta and stable, it behave the same way.

    I send the exact same build to a friend which tried it on a Samsung Galaxy S3 mini, and up to now, he has no problem playing the game. Everything runs perfectly.

    The project is quite big (around 9000 event for now)

    I read some people saying that they have problems with the sounds. I didn't test to delete the sounds yet, but I have a music (placed in the "sound" folder, not "music", because I want it to preload) during the title screen, and the sound plays on both devices, so it's probably not related to sounds.

    I also read that there was problems with the blacklist of webGL on some devices, including some devices from Samsung. I did the following test : created a new project that just displays the name of the renderer, and it returns "webgl". Don't know if it helps.

    I'm also facing another bug, which seem to be related to webStorage : When I activate the loading of webStorage (loading of about 60 number global variables on my title screen) and runs the game on my tablet, it's behaving correctly on preview over wifi running in Chrome for Android (IIRC, need to retest, but at least in Construct preview it works fine), but here, even in Intel XDK's emulator, I'm experiencing another problem. The title screen works ok, but when the game launches, some object simply doesn't appear. On one level I had all my characters diappearing, on another I had the background disappearing. When I turned off all loading of webstorage, this bug was resolved... But I will need webstorage to publish my game...

    One last note : I'm not a programmer at all, and I don't know how to display the error message in XDK, or when trying on the device. Could someone explain, so I can eventually give additional informations?

    Thanks !

  • Hi everyone,

    I'm having troubles with the "export for Crosswalk" option. First of all, I read in the manual "how to export to android with crosswalk" page that there are really minimal difference between this export and the preview over wifi played on chrome (on an android device).

    However, the preview over wifi works perfectly, but when I'm doing an export with crosswalk that I export via Intel XDK, all my characters simply don't appear on the first level... That's on the tablet, on the smartphone, the app simply shuts down as soon as the first level start. To be perfectly clear all of this also works perfectly when exporting over wifi.

    I really need help with this, everything worked perfectly up to now, I really don't understand what's going on.

    Maybe is my project just too big? There are 8500 events now, is there any limit?

    I also use a loading layout, but even this layout takes a LOT of time to appear (sometimes more than 30 seconds), even though I just have a single sprite and the loading bar on it (I read that we should keep it as small as possible).

    FYI the tablet on which I play the app is a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3. Any idea of what's going on?

    Thanks !

  • Try Construct 3

    Develop games in your browser. Powerful, performant & highly capable.

    Try Now Construct 3 users don't see these ads

  • Hi !

    Thanks for your replies. I'll definitely keep the whole game in only one layout.

    To answer your question I started the game about 2 month ago, and it's not an MMO or anything like that. I suppose an experienced construct 2 user would do the same game with much less events. Still, I have many characters/enemies and most of them need a good bunch of events to describe their behavior.