You could try an API like TimeAPI, using the AJAX object to fetch the data you need.

I think a simple Like or Thank You system would definitely enhance this forum. Among other features, it could do things like adding reputation to the authors of posts that receive likes or allowing thread posts to be sorted by likes. Such a system would have the following benefits:

• One could show their appreciation for a quality forum post without having to bump the thread.
• Posters would be incentivized to leave quality responses.
• Reputation would more accurately reflect one's value in this forum rather than simply one's participation.
• It would be easy to sift through the most important posts in a thread, because they'd have the most likes.
• It could make the forum even more fun!

I'm sure a similar idea has been considered in the past, which is why I'm surprised it doesn't exist here. I can see how a comment rating system might make things competitive and infuriate people when they're downvoted, but we are only talking about happy, pleasant, warm Likes. It still keeps up the positive vibe!

My game is pretty basic. When you lose, there's a minimalistic Game Over screen that shows both your score for the current round and your best score.

[That's Flappy Bird, not my game]

The predicament rests in the fact that my game allows players to use Google Play leaderboards if they so choose. This creates a complication for me if I want to preserve the minimalistic look of the Game Over screen. Which score should I show as their "Best"? The high score stored on the device, or the high score fetched from Google Play?

If I show the Google Play score, it will appear to disregard any high scores the player had achieved on their device before logging in. If I show the device score, it will disregard any higher Google Play scores. If I show the highest of the two scores (what I'm currently doing), it could confuse the player. If I sync up the two scores, it will cause issues if two people want to play on the same device but with different accounts.

I'm now starting to feel like I should only work with the device score, and let Google Play handle the rest. They can click the Leaderboards button to open the Google Play interface, and then they can see their high scores, weekly high scores, and what not. So let them go to Google for that. I'll deal with the local stuff.

I'm not sure what the "standard" is in these situations because I don't play a lot of mobile games. What do you think I should do?

shinkan,

Hmmm, for some reason I thought it was easier to get fillrate limited, but now that you made me think about it, perhaps it isn't a fillrate issue. My game is 1920x1080, so assuming a flat layout, in a second it would write 147 MPixels, and my device apparently can do around 800. So unless there's something majorly wrong going on with my graphics, it should be a lot harder to reach that limit. But I'm still not sure if I understand all this stuff completely.

I will go ahead and try yours and Aurel 's approach and see if it works. It is what I would have done, but I didn't since I figured that having an "Overlay" layer dedicated to transitions was somehow a neater approach. I didn't think it would make a difference.

Aurel, shinkan:

Thanks for the ideas, but now I'm not sure they would be very different from my original approach in terms of rendering performance. What seems to be happening in my game is that the so-called fillrate capacity of my GPU is being reached. This is because I'm drawing a lot on screen already, and having to draw a white object on top of all the entire screen maxes out the device's rendering capacity for a frame, so it drops in framerate during fades.

if my understanding is correct, the new approach I use should strive to limit the number of pixels the GPU has to draw, so I don't use up my device's fillrate capacity. The approach Colludium suggested did this by 'flattening' the rest of the game content by taking a snapshot and then hiding the other layers. This could work, but I'm afraid of the huge image size and it sounds like a slight headache to implement.

So now I feel that a shader may be the best overall approach for fading. The other approach that comes to my mind now is to somehow "flatten" my game content to reduce overdraw, but I feel that the real culprit is a poor fade implementation. Clearly, games with reasonably complex scenes would have the same issue with using a sprite to fade. There must be a better way!

But yeah, thanks again for the help guys! I'm still open to new ideas, but I'm pretty sure fillrate is the issue here, so anything that uses sprites over the whole layer will likely not work.

Interesting, thanks for the idea. However, that snapshot might be too large (1080x1920) to be considered safe on mobile, let alone compatible with CocoonJS Canvas+, which has a maximum size for textures. Since my game is designed for mobile, I probably wouldn't want to use this approach.

I feel like a shader that does this properly would be my best bet. Doesn't seem too hard to write one since it's just basic alpha blending, right? Then again, I don't know enough about writing shaders to be able to say

Any more ideas you have are always appreciated!

I realize this is a minor thing, but it felt easy enough to report. The checkmark after "My comment isn't aggravating" is pushed to the next line. The screenshot is from the release page.

I currently fade from and to white by using an "Overlay" layer with the background set to white, and changing its opacity. I went this approach because it most easily achieves a fullscreen white-out on varying device resolutions.

The issue is that it results in a lot of overdraw and thus fillrate issues on certain devices, causing a drop in framerate during fades. Do you have any ideas for a more performant approach?

EDIT: I thought of using an Effect (brightness or something) on the entire layout. Tried it out, and Brightness looks UGLY. So it rules that effect out at least. Perhaps there is another effect I could use?

That is very helpful, thanks!

Now I need an iOS one.

Any good resource where I can find out what devices people are currently using?

E.g.

Samsung Galaxy S4: X million people

Samsung Galaxy S6: Y million people

iPhone 4s: Z million people...

iPhone 6: bla million people...

etc.

A percentage breakdown would suffice. I'm having trouble finding this info. Appreciate your help!

If you don't change any of the object images or animations, then simply use letterbox scale mode. Then on a 720p screen you'll get 720p display.

Definitely. That's what my game already does. However, I'm wanting 720p on a 1080p screen, or even a 4k screen. Essentially, I want to limit the max resolution. Does it make sense to do that to improve performance? The idea is that the GPU will have to render less overall pixels, but I'm not sure if what I'm doing to achieve that makes any sense.

I used this tutorial the other day, maybe this will help you

https://www.scirra.com/tutorials/932/mu ... erformance

This method is almost perfect for my needs. However, it seems that if you click on the 5th square (going right to left), and then click on the 4th square, the view gets cut off to only show the region in the bottom-right. What causes this exactly? And how could one fix it? The events appear identical. It's only that specific combination (Scale to 6.0, then Scale to 3.0) that appears to cause it. Wth?

Thank you all! Some very good insights here. Marapa, that tutorial is basically perfect