lennaert :
Well, to me the pb with the 30/60 fps is more on newer devices than older ones.
My game flickers a lot on my Ipad3 with fps between 55/60 for example. Even a drop for 60 to 58 is very noticable.
That's why we are a lot asking to be able to set the fps at 30, to get rid of that, and have a stable framerate : we would prefer a stable 30 than a shaking 60, simply because people will not see they are at 30, but will see the shakes (cause there are really visible).
On older devices, like an ipod4, i'm around 30, so i personnaly don't care on that point regarding an older device (it's more a question of optimization in that case). But maybe people concider that devices (ipad3 for example) as old ones already.
I already uses timers for collisions, i've optimised my game a lot, i've optimized my code, but it's still there, it's not a question of code in that case i think. Of course you can get rid of that by having just 10 objects on the screen or 1 collision test in the layout (i exagerate voluntirally), but if you try to do a more complex game, it's difficult to get rid of that, if you do an action game or a platformer, and use a scrolling.
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Is the flickering related to reduced frame rate ? wouldnt your request for a lower frame rate be counter productive then ? i would assume you get more time between flickers ?
Or do you expect that with a reduced framerate the overall processing goes faster ?
Hadnt heard or seen that before :\ granted, I'm kinda new
Got some stuff running slow, but never flickering.
Only time I actually got flickering was with objects outside of the layout with CocoonJS.
And an Ipad unable to keep up ...that must be some heavy game then, you sure you have chosen the right development platform? :P (yoke yoke)
lennaert - I think your first question is valid: what constitutes a mid-range device today? I am sure we could discuss this for weeks as everyone will have a different target audience for their products and, so, a different opinion. Regarding your assertion that poor programming could be the cause of these problems, I am afraid that I must disagree as I don?t think you see the problem. As — points out, those of us who are asking for this feature do so having already tried to reduce the processor loading in our games as much as feasible. However, the issues seem to be caused by things out of our control like the C2 engine processing maths for objects with physics or platform behaviours and trying to do that at the rate of 60 fps (or, to be more accurate, vsync). Try and play a few of the Scirra arcade games on your phone browser and you?ll see the problem we are trying to alleviate.
Hmm, I've encountered many problems with phone browsers and web based apps .. but thats mostly due to the device also having to run a full fledged browser in order to support the html5 aspects. Though my smartphones processing power is nice ... the rather small memory becomes the next bottle neck, not my code. (well, in a lot of situations anyway)