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  • It's a 3rd party plugin and isn't supported here. You need to contact whoever wrote it to get support.

    Edit to add: you can use the Scroll To behaviour and get the screen to shake that way. There is also a good camera plugin that will allow you to shake the screen...

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  • eli0s, LOL!

    I too feel a tad helpless and at the mercy of 3rd parties to improve their browsers' GC. I'm going to have to shut off sections of my events and see if there's anything I can do to improve things; I suspect, however, that only time will provide the solution for browser games.... Oddly enough, Node performance is flawless - so why should that be if it's based on Chrome??

  • Nice work!

  • skelooth, I think part of the problem is one of my expectations compared to yours - I understand that you don't see this staccato game play as a problem, but my expectations are that all game movement from C2's engine should be as smooth as every other html5 game I have seen... Especially the first 20 seconds, when a new player is likely to decide whether or not to quit a game.

    I am also just embarking on my first 'proper' and hopefully 'for sale' project - and I made the GTA reference, as — so eloquently put, because I am not sure I will receive favourable reviews if this cannot be fixed. If more demanding games like GTA play smoothly on the same hardware then my simple platformer will always appear to be at fault. I am already being very careful to avoid the unnecessary creation/destruction of objects mitigate this. However, and especially during the first few seconds of a layout, this problem doesn't seem to be manageable just by being careful with events. I want to avoid having a 15 sec 'loading' splash or showing a message like "some users may occasionally see stuttering game play (just ignore it)".

    A couple of Ludum Dares ago I created a platformer and received a couple of comments that the game play was jerky, even though the effect was far less apparent than the demo I linked to earlier in this thread - so it's not just my imagination that this is a problem. I'm expecting to put a lot of hours into my game, but if C2 isn't up to the job then you might be right - maybe I'm trying to use the wrong tool for the job (or maybe I should limit myself to 640x480 or similar with no scale up to full screen). I have tinkered with Unity a little bit over the last couple of years and Unity's 2D optimisations are really quite brilliant; but C2 is far easier to use and I intend to stick with it for long term because I hope that this issue can and will be fixed.

    I have no idea how Ashley has implemented garbage collection in C2 (assuming that is the culprit) and I have no idea how difficult a job it might be to fix. But there is definitely room for improvement and I live in hope, and if you don't ask you never get.

  • Yes, small window res and letterbox integer scale can certainly reduce the jitter, but my laptop will quite happily play GTA at resolutions that make a C2 platform game appear like it is being rendered on 1980s technology.

  • I agree that it it doesn't look like the end of the world, but it does detract from an otherwise glossy performance. A quick visit to various html5 gaming sites and I cannot find any examples of other games that exhibit this sort of stuttering problem...

    What I found interesting in trying to set up that little example is that the jitter didn't seem to get any worse even if I went mad and created dozens of extra sprites - so there was little difference when I had 500 dynamic objects bouncing around or 50.

    What I find frustrating is that when there's a ludicrous amount going on, the player is less likely to notice any jitter because they will be focussed on other movements, but when there are just a handful of sprites on screen, any jitter to the scrolling background (ie the player's movement when scrolled to) really stands out.

  • eli0s, thanks! And I agree, I think that the more complicated the game (graphics and events) then the more pronounced the effect becomes. It makes me feel like I'm developing for mobile when, in fact, I'm targeting whopping big hardware that can easily cope with the likes of GTA!

  • Ruskul, - I'm developing for desktop - browser and Node. This jittering is usually very slight and manifests as a momentary hesitation, but to my eyes it stands out very pronounced indeed.

    I've just posted a demo capx in the other thread here.

  • Here's a quick example I put together to hopefully demonstrate the effect I'm talking about. It contains a couple of deliberate inefficiencies (creating unnecessary objects and then destroying them), but they serve to create the effect I'm trying to demonstrate. I would have thought that a tiny project like this (2.8 mb image memory) would not cause any problems on my mighty laptop...

    Are my expectations of html5 just way off?

    Edit - it's a simple platformer with stuff happening... Standard controls.

  • eli0s, you're right - I can still detect the jittering after 10-15 secs, it's just far less pronounced after that time. Incidentally, if I try and do any periodic work using sprites (like ray-casting with collision checks every 0.5 sec) then that seriously impacts on smoothness. I'll try and put a small demo together to show you what I mean. But, bottom line, the jittering is always present to some degree and it really spoils what would otherwise be an awesome engine.

  • Aphrodite, GC is where my suspicions lie as well.

  • Good questions skelooth, and no - I have no webgl shader effects on my layout, platform behaviour, 4 parallaxing layers, 220 objects and 30 collision checks per tick. The interesting thing is that the engine seems to settle down after a short while, and that it seems to get 'upset' by changes to the layout content....

    I just tried Ashley's performance test in Chrome... webgl off = 6000 objects at 30 fps, webgl on = 4000 objects at 30 fps. I have no idea why webgl would be less efficient than canvas... I got similar but slightly worse performance in Firefox.

    here's the link to the blog with the perf tests

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Colludium

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