Tinimations

Interesting why it behaves wildly different on Win 7/8 vs 10.. it's still Chromium underneath NW.

And yes, this isn't a C2 issue but Chromium, however, we still rely on it for our export.

Yup, it certainly does cache everything you've used on your layouts. So despite "per layout" design of C2, the 3rd party wrappers (Chromium) pretty much load everything and holds it in memory as a cache despite C2's active layout having functional garbage collection.

I didn't even realize that until I investigated it further after Klang's developer mentioned 4GB of memory usage crashing 32 bit OS.

Because of this, you can forget about making bigger games for mobiles with C2, even if mobile hardware can handle the logic & GPU power is enough, most devices have 1GB memory only, which they have to share with the OS & background apps.

Has it been on the top 10 sales page? Running with Rifles and Ace of spades both made it to the top 10 list sales list.

And all we did was work hard for our steam success.

Maybe you need to work harder?

Good for you man.

We just don't work as hard as you do, I'm sure.

jojoe looks like you still don't get it <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_wink.gif" alt=";)" title="Wink"> Anonnymitet already understood why I wrote that. So let me explain it to you. What I mean to say is that Steam is not everything. For some reason PC players and most of the new developers think Steam is a holy grail of "publish my game - get rich immediately".

"Without steam support = no serious game developers" - That statement clearly insult everyone who is interested only in making games for mobiles or web browsers either free or paid. It looks like, if you don't have your game on steam you are not serious game developer.

Steam isn't everything, but it's a great opportunity for PC/MAC developers. Whether people succeed or not on Steam isn't the point. Game engines need to give them the opportunity to succeed.

jojoe

Define "no C2 developer has been successful on steam does not mean the rest of us don't have a chance"

Our Darker Purpose http://steamspy.com/app/262790

The Next Penelope also sold nearly 6,000 copies since May this year. Not a huge success, but not abject failure by any stretch of the imagination.

"2/3 projects I have worked on are successful on steam. (Ace of spades, Running with Rifles) It is not as hard as some people think. It just takes hard work is why most people are failing."

If only "hard work" is all it took...

Tinimations

Does it crash on 64 bit NW?

Last time I had a discussion with Ashley about explicit asset control, ie. loading/unloading on command to get fine-tune control over memory usage, he said he doesn't think its a good idea to give C2 users that power, because the potential there for people to "not know what they are doing" and mess it up real bad.

The current system works fine for most games, since we rarely have so much animated assets of high resolution to use ~4GB of memory (saturating 32bit). Your game is obviously an outlier.

It would be very useful to have explicit memory control regardless, more tools = good for power users.

> That is what I get after playing awhile, the 2nd processes (biggest) reaches ~700MB.

>

a separate and somewhat disturbing issue is why that second process grows? so NW forces this caching which negates any benefit the current "Layouts-only-load-into-memory-what-is-needed and frees it when going to a new layout" architecture?

Well the benefit would be quicker asset spawning on new layouts, rather than reading the file from disk, it reads it from the cache memory. RAM is about 20x faster than even SSDs (but despite that, memory access is still latency bound, around 1 frame's worth for random access).

I would think if there's insufficient memory for the cache, it would therefore load from disk. If its on a mechanical drive, there would be a very visible stutter. Or big animated sprites, even from SSD, would stutter.

It's a "good" behavior since it does not allow us explicit control over asset loading & unloading, so it stores it in the cache, as non-vital memory usage, if there's memory available.

Tinimations that can't be right. My entire game has 3 processes running and doesn't equal more than 300MB

32-bit NW 10.5

I use 32-bit NW 10.5 too. I would guess all of my assets if loaded would take around 700-800MB. That is what I get after playing awhile, the 2nd processes (biggest) reaches ~700MB.

An empty layout in the game without any art, sound or events. One of NW.js processes uses minimal ram here, but there's always one process (which I guess is cache) uses roughly 1.5 gb even in an empty layout.

There's two nw.exe process, the smaller one is your current game/layout.

There's a second process of nw.exe that loads all your assets as they appear in your layouts. It acts as a cache I think. The more layouts you change, or more sprites you call in, the bigger the cache becomes. Once it maxes out (loaded everything available in your game), it doesn't grow.

I'm not sure what would happen if there's not enough system ram for the cache to grow since my PCs have 12-16GB ram and my game tops out around 700mb. If yours top out at 4GB for the full game, I don't think you need to worry for PC/MAC as most low end systems have 4-8GB memory.

If I had to guess what happens when you don't have enough memory for caching, it would load from your disk, causing major stutters as big sprites with animations are called in.

Maybe Ashley can verify or explain the inner workings of this process.

— I tried exporting a build with it. The jankyness seemed gone, but back was the horrible memory management. The memory use grew bigger and bigger until it eventually crashed (At worst the collective memory use between all the processes was 4gb, LIKE WTF). At least something got better with the latest editions.

I think we discussed this awhile ago, it's probably due to your game having so much music/sounds and the lack of "unload" action to remove sounds from memory.

Since your game is about music/sounds, this is the one case where C2 needs to have an Unload option to go along with the Preload action, to allow developers more control.

This jankyness issue is bringing me to the point of madness. The game starts almost without fault to jag harder and harder the longer the playsession. I'm to submit Klang to IGF this weekend, and I know it stands no real chance in the technical department due to this issue. I'm just hoping the avarage judge quits playing out of time constraints before the jaggyness kicks in. IT REALLY SHOULDN'T BE THIS WAY. Like someone else mentioned, I'm often daydreaming what it would be like to work in GM instead...

I also see there hasn't been a new node webkit since march? When's the new edition with chromium 43+ coming out?

I'm getting desperate here... This jaggyness issue and the ridicilous memory consumption of the engine's making me fear for the game's chance on the market.

You suffer stutter in NW 10.5?

This looks awesome!

Where will it be playable at when released (and what platforms)? Is it multiplayer? (sorry if I missed that info somewhere)

—

Thanks!

It's designed for PC/MAC, I haven't considered how it will play on other platforms yet. Single-player only in scope.

But I do have plans to eventually port it to iOS, for the iPhone 6 Plus and iPads at the least. Android is probably a no go, I'm certain the webview/cordova on Android cannot handle this game's complexity and battles.

iOS's WKWebview is really fast in my experience (~5x faster than Android Chromium), so it should be able to handle a slightly toned down version.

There's a lot of money to be made on iOS if you have a good game, especially if you are already making a game on C2 which is cross-platform, it would be throwing away $$ to not port it to iOS.

So the currently plan is to finish/polish for December Steam release. Then work on the iOS port. When that's done, I have some cool ideas for the next game already. Hopefully Star Nomad 2 earns me enough $ to justify being a game-dev (and buying the Scirra business license!).

Looking forward to playing it, was a big fan of your original

jobel

vtrix

Thanks!

Darth, I hope to release it in December, before xmas. Still have lots of polishing and bug-kill to do, then final balancing etc. Not that much time left til the deadline!