jobel's Forum Posts

  • Also remember that laptops hd screens are not that common yet, and usually their resolution is around 1280x720, and the screens are most often 15", so 860x540 in low quality scaling will look decent, but even on 17" it will look fine.

    right right! didn't even think of this.. so rendering HD when a laptop's max resolution is 1366/768 is a complete waste!

    my only problem now is on some of the advanced UI sections I use screen offsets..ugh..kicking myself! rookie mistake..

  • — any status updates? you haven't posted in a while.

    also, did you use a tutorial or get thread help for your boss' mechanical arm? I'm trying to make a mechanical 2 jointed arm for my player (ship) sans physics..it will be controlled by the right analog stick so that might different than your usage. Haven't been able to find much searching the forums.

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  • The good thing is, that it takes more than just graphics to determine if a game is great.

    this goes without saying... I believe in art and it's not what you have, it's what you do with what you have. So black and white rectangles could be amazing if presented amazingly.

  • But now imagine something different: that your sprite is 64x64 but shrank down in c2 layout editor to 16x16 and the game is still 430x270. In high quality scaling and in full screen and in full hd it again becomes 64x64. But now it is not upscaled 16x16 sprite - it is that original 64x64! Now check this: if the pc is not strong enough to output assets in full hd, you switch renderer to low quality scalling, and now this 16x16 is rendered as 16x16 but upscaled to fit the screen.

    So what you need to do, is to set your games resolution to half hd i wrote above, make all sprites in the editor half the size, but load original hd assets, and those will render now differently depending on the type of scaling.

    okay got it! sounds good, I will definitely check this out. Awesome.. thanks! So when you mentioned before keep decreasing the asset resolution.. you mean find a point where it looks good without looking too blurry for that low-quality setting?

    btw, I can't imagine anyone playing my game windowed, it will always be fullscreen, I'm not giving them the option if I can help it.

    Is high quality scaling a run-time modifiable parameter? i.e. could I have a user change this setting while the game is running?

    And now going back to your question about optimising the graphics: you do this in photoshop. For example that nebula could be done differently: instead of having interlaced 16-bit or higher png, you can set its saturation and levels in ps, and also replace transparency with black colour, then export as 8-bit png, and in c2 editor set it's blending mode, making black background becoming transparent.

    I've done this (blend mode to additive) on black backgrounded images before, but I had no idea it saved memory... it sounds familiar, but I guess I never really looked into it! How much of a difference does it make? I have a TON of images that have LOTS of transparency. Should I convert them all???

  • megatronx my genre is top-down space shooter.. unbound layout. So I have pretty big background graphics.. nebulas, star, planets etc.. the nebulas are the most worrisome because there needs to be a lot to give the levels some "life" (color), otherwise it's all bland black and white stars...I'll be posting the trailer this week.. here's my parallax test vid.

    https://vimeo.com/137027609

    keep all assets hd first, but then gradually lower their resolution, starting with the obvious assets of lowest priority of importance.

    Do you mean make my current graphics lowres, by Shift-click dragging the corner of the sprite in the Layout view? or are you saying to scale them down in PS?

    I was originally thinking of doing exactly what you are saying as a way to test performance - like who cares what the graphics look like, just make all my current assets tiny and run the game. But I have so many things on my plate I decided to come to the boards to see if anyone was ever wondering the same thing. i.e. is it a worth while test?

  • Hmm... I can't say that I've ever really thought that performance would be an issue at 1920x1080. The only machines my game doesn't run on are the old laptops at work, and their GPUs don't even support webGL.

    have you tried your game on a laptop with HD4000 Intel graphics? my guess is it would be very laggy. The unevenness about C2 dev is that you make a low budget game, but users can't have a low budget computer to play it! I worry about the backlash of users that get upset the game isn't smooth because it's a 2D game and requires hardware acceleration. But alas you can't please everyone. I think — has the right idea by setting minimum requirements at AMD/Nvidia cards.. that way you cover yourself.

  • For me it was a nightmare and took very long time to make decision of dropping hd assets and going with pixelart. But the longer that decision took, the more other things I did in construct and ultimately, in the end it was easier to go with pixelart.

    yes, probably in the "grand scheme of things" switching art assets/resolution would probably only take a week... but having the actual art done would take considerably longer.

  • megatronx yeah I'd have to do my own bench marks to make sure it'd be worth it. I've done a lot of the art myself in the game (and I'm not really an artist - not that I didn't put the hours in!).. so if I could make the game run considerably faster on slower machines I'd consider it, since I'd be forced to work with a real artist -- I don't have time to learn pixel-art style!

    I originally picked 1920x1080 not knowing anything really... I was working with an artist at the time and he was being snooty about HD graphics and I was like, okay, let's do HD. So now, 2 years later (and the artist is long gone) here I am.

    anyways just wondering if anyone on here went through the same decision making, of having to decide the best resolution for NW.js - it of course depends on the game, but performance is a genuine factor.

  • So you can tell the users to do it themselves: normally there is a control panel that allows users to manually set the GPU for each program.

    This is great to add for support! thanks..

    My test machine is a $350 USD laptop with a HD4400 gpu. And I looked in control panel and I didn't see any 3D settings or anything like that. I'm glad to have such a low-end machine so I can see the how the game will perform on the low end of the spectrum.

    I'm just wondering if I had made the game's art low-res pixel-art and the entire resolution was 240x135 if I'd be seeing the same issues?

  • can't see image..

    clones of the moving sprite? short of making a new colored sprite, you could just spawn the same sprite, enable an effect like "Set Color".

  • ...my minimum spec is an AMD or NV GPU.

    This is probably best to have this in the requirements, but to Colludium 's point, I can also see it frustrating users since it seems overkill for a 2D engine. But I guess.. what can you do? it is what it is..

  • If you can make sure everyone switches your game to the powerful GPU, all your performance issues should be resolved!

    sorry if this is a dumb question, but can you explain this "switching"? Are you saying users have control over how their systems run a NW.js game? This reminds me of how in Blender you can set the render to CPU or GPU, the latter giving you a huge boost to render times.

  • That's not true, layout-by-layout loading frees images when you change layouts, so it only ever has one layout loaded.

    I have observed when playing (the NW.js export) there are 3 processes (2 of them are background processes) that end up growing as the game is being played. So far in my game it seems to cap out at around 600MB (total). I was under the impression the reason for this is that NW caches objects in memory to allow them to be loaded without any jank and that it caches each Layout as they are loaded. I'm well aware of C2's Layout memory management, I just figured it was something negated by NW.js, but if you are saying that is not the case, then that's great news. Although it still does not explain this memory usage.

  • ... but with fullscreen resolution (even though the base resolution is less than 320x240) there is still major slow-down which is apparently caused by the upscaling/fill rate based on the past conversations regarding the performance issues of Node.JS/Node-WebKit

    Is this with turning on "low quality" in Project Properties?

  • thanks!