Tylermon's Forum Posts

  • Stencyl had a smaller community in my opinion. Often times less comments and less developer activity. Things might have changed/grown though.

    The puzzle type snapping also turned me off. You can do about as much with the two programs however stencyl felt less intuitive to use. Stencyl simply gets a bit confusing in how it looks and operates. When I used it I felt like the system was working against me. That said I only briefly used it. Because of those reasons.

    Another option you may like is gamemaker. As far as drag and drop goes it sucks. But the gml scripting is superb. You can do a ton with it, if you have experience with actual code it will be easy to get into. If you have no experience it is still fairly easy to learn. The editor however is not my favorite. I would still be using gamemaker if they had a good editor for layouts and such.

    Gamemaker exports everything natively. Great program.

    Finally construct2. Best for last right? Given the other two options, here I am. I've used both but prefer construct. It has a superior editor to gamemaker, a bit similar to stencyl. Coding is much easier and quicker to use than both gamemaker and stencyl. However it can be slow to learn if you have actual coding experience. I stepped right into gamemaker familiar how to make things work, felt very very very limited with what I saw with construct 2's functions and behaviors.

    Truth is, construct 2 looks incredibly shallow. To simple to be any good. But it is secretly this very powerful tool that can let you do just about anything.

    What would take me 30 minutes to an hour in gamemaker takes me 5-10 minutes in construct.

    Learning and understanding construct can be tricky.

    Mastering it takes a ton of time.

    I have not made any large projects. Mostly been playing and learning it on and off in my spare time. But finally have a confidence with it where I think I could manage just about anything with it.

    I can tell I have lost my focus a bit so am going to cut myself off.

    I say try all the engines. But if you value time and quality construct will leave you very satisfied.

    One warning. I must stress. Construct is incredibly art driven. You need an art asset to implement your code.

    This is my one big dislike to construct. Gamemaker would allow me to get a big chunk of code in place without worrying about art. Construct won't let you do anything without it.

    You learn to get used to this though.

    Hope that helps.

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  • Lots of good information. It is looking like CJS might be the way to go then.

    More devices and similar performance as the other options is what I am reading.

    Does cjs support iAds?

    If not, no big deal I suppose.

    Is construct 2 using the latest CJS plugin? It do I need to do something to get things working?

  • Essentially, What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

    Is one necessarily "better" to use than the others?

    I have use cocoonJS in the past. Had good results with it. I'm aware it eventually was no longer supported, but recently has stepped things up with some major updates.

    Having not played with the others,

    Can I get some Pro's /Con's

    Maybe an understanding of when to use, and when not to use one of the three?

    Thanks.

  • Elios

    I can only think of a couple possibilities.

    1. Motherboard bios. Are they up to date?

    2. CPU and/or memory issue. Potentially corrected by better bios.

    3. It could be display drivers/your screen(s) If you have a different screen to try that would be interesting.

  • Here are the bug reports I've submitted. Fingers crossed that they create the desired effect...

    https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issu ... 1415074675

    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1093454

    Looks good. Hopefully we see this addressed!

    Tweeted that bug report, so hopefully it spreads around!

  • Ashley

    This chrominium bug report you linked to a few pages back describes this very behavior. Here:

    https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issu ... ?id=422000

    Canary indicates that google is working on this, but the results are inconsistent. At best, it matches or exceeds IE's performance. At times, it seems to regress back to the profile of the current stable. It'll be interesting to see what state it's in when v40 goes beta.

    Firefox is just an awful mess in general, but project silk indicates they are aware of this and are trying to correct it.

    eli0s

    Your cpu may be old, but it's powerful. If it was me I'd try stock clocks and see if the behavior changes. Your gpu is pretty good period...have you updated your graphics drivers lately? Do you notice halting when playing normal PC games?

    Tylermon

    Wow, now those are some spec's <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile"> But your results...that's very strange. I've never had canary perform worse than chrome stable. And IE has always been rock solid. How does firefox do? Generally, it seems to be the worst of the lot.

    Chrome/Firefox reminds me of this joke:

    "Did you hear about the statistician who had his head in an oven and his feet in a bucket of ice? When asked how he felt, he replied, "On the average I feel just fine."

    I dont use firefox anymore exactly because it usually performs the worst of the lot haha.

    Once upon a time I loved that fiery fox. Those days are gone.

    ----------

    It is worth mentioning I have just about every flag enabled in my chrome browser and had not done the same with canary...very possible this is why.

    the url's

    chrome://flags

    or

    chrome://chrome-urls

    are fairly useful and fun to look into.

  • I currently am working on a mini mmo/rpg.

    And a very simple retro spaceship game.

    I'm really into the RPG's and small minigame type of things.

    Allows me to have a big ambitious project, yet still be able to complete and see progress on small projects.

    What you CAN make is ANYTHING. If it is 2d it can be done.

  • What I suggest. And what I am doing.

    I have my "dream games" "love projects" the games I really care about... I have those and know what I want to do with them.

    If you are like me...those projects are rather...lets say ambitious. They will not be made overnight.

    So work on those. Try to do things. Make certain gameplay elements work. But dont expect to finish them yet.

    After you learn a bunch. And I really hate to say it. Stop the "dream game" for a bit.

    Think simple. Very simple. Use what you have learned to make and finish a complete game.

    I currently have 2 "real" projects. A large-scale mmo type game. And a simple spaceship game.

    They are opposite in everyway possible. I dont hate the spaceship game, but it is not my "dream" game. It is a game I know would be fun, and profitable for my time. So I am making it simply to make it.

    It is a learning experience as I get better to keep going with my main project.

    ------------

    Oh, and yeah....art SUCKS.

    Wish I loved art when I was little, because that is the one thing that really holds me back.

    Spending 2 hours on some sad looking art and 5 minutes to get the code working really frustrates me. Im at a point where i know what I want to do and how to do it...but art is really holding me back.

    Colorful shapes make for great placeholders I must say. Lets you get a project working quick. Sadly I don't use colorful shapes as often as I maybe should....

  • eli0s

    My system was getting similar results. My results were very stable. And seemed to drop a lot of data, the decimal values were not getting shown on graphs. for some odd reason.

    Thats why I had to make the version where it could have more decimals/ move the decimal over to see what was going on.

    My system:

    i7 3930k (6 cores 4.6ghz)

    gtx 780

    32gb ram 1866mhz

    I tried canary, latest download. It was terrible on my system. dt anywhere from 14 to like 18. Constantly stuttering and creating frame rate drops/ jitter

    IE wont obey my refresh rates at all. 60hz gives 67fps and 120+ was giving 60 fps >.> 120hz+ had a nice dt though...if I was running 60hz

    Chrome has worked the best for me. Seemingly hit or miss though. Sometimes it stays fairly close to 16.7 other times it gets closer towards the 16/17.

    I have found chrome really only cares about having an average dt of 16.7 which sounds nice on paper being able to say chrome almost always has an average dt spot on...except it really does not ever have the correct dt which is useless.

  • Colludium

    The picture you keep talking about clearly said I had a max dt of 17.03 and a min dt of 15.96 using your capx. Last I checked...not solid numbers. The bottom left yellow numbers, 17.0, 16.7 and 16.0 are the exact same numbers your pictures have.

    I'm not certain of everything your capx was trying to show. It confused me which is why I asked for the capx. I didnt fully understand your capx so I made my own.. personally, I wanted a line for fps, and a line for dt. Those are the things that i care about and believe are important. I also wanted to test 60hz, 120hz and 144hz.

    Objects are destroyed when they leave the layout

    No data to skew there, I promise! (if they didn't get destroyed your fps would never be stable. It would always drop.)

    The red line shows dt's direct reading(depends on decimal place chosen). When dt changes, the red line changes.

    Small dt is a low line, high dt is a high line.

    The drop down on the left changes the scale of dt to "magnify" it so to speak. Exaggerates what can visually be seen to hopefully make it very easy to see correlation with dt and fps.

    Essentially, it allows for dt to directly translate to a pixel location. The value is the same. The Accuracy/level of graph detail is all that changes.

  • Something I find interesting, is dt is directly proportionate to fps.

    High fps = low dt = more frequent ticks = lower fps = higher dt = less ticks = go to beginning.

    What does the above do? Cause a speed up/ slow down.

    For me, I can only get this effect above 60hz. And the pattern looks pretty consistent between dt/fps graph.

    Unless a browser maintains a solid vsync/refresh and a machine can provide the fps to match you get jitter.

    Attached picture shows the DT spikes correlate with FPS drops. Which causes DT to drop/stabilize. And Repeat.

    Still though. This effect is not the same as the OP. This has more to do with my creating an object every tick. But it could contribute to the effect in some projects. It also shows some issues with fps/browser vysnc.

    IE at 121hz lowers to 60fps. As a result it is stable, does not have that effect nearly as much as chrome.

    Chrome however performed amazing at 60hz where IE then went above the 60hz refresh.

    And one more picture.

    Please note: in this image the blue fps graph is still technically higher than the red dt graph. The red graph is essentially enlarged/zoomed in.

    The dt spikes still correlate to the fps drops.

    It also really shows how unstable dt is. Where we would ideally want dt to be constant.

  • Colludium

    Not sure what you mean.

    My dt is measured to the millionths place. And fluctuates.

    My vsync/refresh rate was manually set to 60hz on my monitors. Thats why you see 60fps and not 120fps/144fps or more.

    Your capx was admittedly a little strange to follow so I made a spin-off to do the same thing. I added in a way to control the accuracy which is great to see which browsers are more stable.

    https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/583 ... index.html

    I found chrome to be stable up to the 10,000th decimal.

    IE was stable up to the 1,000th decimal.

    I also found IE to disregard my refresh rate. (ran around 68fps) Should have stayed at 60.

    Chrome held a solid 60.

  • My results.

    Colludium Also, I would love the capX

    Currently your project does not support 120hz / 144hz displays. Had to manually put them at 60hz.

    Chrome version: 38.0.2125.111 (Official Build 290379) m

  • I personally don't know many instances where I need 1200+ objects constantly being created every second.

    That's what you are describing. Your 20+objects a tick is 1200+ objects a second being created and similarly destroyed only to be created again.

    I would still be interested to see said 20 a tick improved. But I also want to see how that performs realistically. Creating worst case scenario projects isn't helping with making real games.

    We are not talking about using 1200+ objects. This is creating and destroying this many, objects on top of trying to use them on top of any other game logic.

    The OP was about a single sprite moving and seeming jittery/stuttering. This new scenario is one of insanity in my opinion, a non issue. I would love to see objects rendered more smoothly though.

  • Ashley

    Obviously, you understand how the internals of C2 work better than us. But, maybe you could take a look at this example capx and see if you see a difference in performance between forced object recycling and normal create/destroy operations. Click to toggle between modes.

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/s2v4h18r172v4 ... .capx?dl=0

    P.S. GeometriX: I modded your capx for this.

    I would almost say it is an issue of the browsers trying too hard to find and delete objects on their own. It gets so concerned with locating/destroying objects and cant keep up with the game itself. (Non-recycled has 2000 objects vs 5000 recycled)

    Like I said earlier, the way the game works, only 1 thing really works at a time. So if the browser is focusing on figuring out what it should remove, vs us telling what to remove or even re-use it is going to slow things down.

    I also don't think that has much to do with the Jittery movement. Garbage collection might help performance for objects off screen, but rarely should be a real issue.

    If you need 2000+ objects all being animated off screen....you might be doing something wrong. Dynamic content creation would greatly limit how many objects you need.

    I am fairly certain the issue comes with refresh rates/v-sync as Ashley was saying.

    Locking movement at or below refresh rate removes all jittery movement.

    This is for both aero and non aero browsing.

    when I set my system to 144hz (144fps) the jittery movement can hardly be seen.

    60hz and 60 fps, again looks smooth.

    If I try to go above the refresh with movement, jittering is seen, more so at lower refresh than higher. Thats why I was making a big deal about the frames needing proper interpolation, tv's often do this. And in animation, getting smooth animations greatly comes from proper interpolation.

    I'm willing to bet, a project that has invisible sprites as the actual game and "real" positions with visible sprites interpolating to those invisible sprites will get that "smooth" effect people here want.

    I have to really really stress though, a square is much easier to see a jitter to movement than a fully animated player in an actual game environment.

    in "real world" uses, this "issue" is not so much an issue as people are making it out to be.

    Some1 feel free to yell at me if none of that makes any sense. I'm really tired today haha. And admittedly my brain is like bleghhh and spit forth thoughts. Enjoy <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_razz.gif" alt=":P" title="Razz">