I am developing games in libgdx for HTML5 deployment.
Even if my games are not demanding in terms of performance(g.e.tipical SNAKE game) I find very huge differences between clients connecting from different computers.
It seems the games are too senstive to hardware when deployed on browser.
My question:
I fear I am doing something wrong, or something js does not like. So I ask for general guidelines to avoid FPS drops on HTML. I'm trying to always use small resources (textures, audio, etc); Use TextureAtlas for icons ans small images.
Does anybody have some guideline or hints?
Thanks beforehand!
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For the past year I have been working on an isometric city builder. So far I have not used any framework apart from a loose PureMVC clone.
I have heard of Starling but only recently have I played with it.
From my research, the performance boost is fenomenal, but this forces me to manage my resource a lot tighter.
At the moment, I am exporting building animations one building at a time, in ~16 frames/pngs. These are cropped, resized and exported in Photoshop by a script and then imported in Flash, then exported as a swf, to be loaded / preloaded / postloaded on demand.
The frames are way too big to make a spritesheet with them, per building. I believe its called an atlas.
These pngs are then blited between lock() and unlock(). After the buildings + actors walking around are sorted, that is.
I am unsure if just using starling.Movieclip for the buildings, where instead of loading the pngs, I would build a MovieClip symbol with its frames. So bliting wouldn't even be necessary. Unless adding bliting on top of Starling would improve performance even more. That would allow fatter features such as particles effects, maybe some lighting.
Google isn't offering me a strait answer, thus I am asking here.
Google isn't offering a straight answer because there isn't such. It depends very very much on what you've done, how much knowledge you've got and what are your goals.
Using Starling gives benefits as well as drawbacks. Your idea of resources will change totally. If you really have enormous amount of assets, then putting them into GPU will be really slow process. You must start from there - learn what Starling does, how resources are managed with it and what you need to change in order to make the transition between the two.
If this is not that hard and time consuming task, you will have some performance optimization. BUT again it depends on your current code. Your current code is really important in this situation as if it's perfectly optimized your gain won't be that much (but commonly would still be).
If you need to switch between graphics regularly or you need to have dynamic assets (as images for example) you must keep in mind that uploading to GPU is the slowest part when talking about Starling and Stage3D.
So again, there is not a straight answer. You must think of GPU memory and limit, GPU upload time, as well as assets management. You also need to think of the way your code is built and if you are going to have any impact if you make the switch (if your code heavily depends on the MovieClip like structure, with all that frames and things) - it will be hard for you. One of the toughest things I fought with Stage3D was the UI implementation - there is almost only Feathers UI which will take you a few weeks to get along with.
On the other hand, Starling performs pretty well, especially on mobile devices. I was able to maintain a stable 45fps on a heavy UI app with a lot of dynamic loading content and multiple screens on an old iPhone 4S, which I find great. Latest mobile devices top at 60fps.
It's up to you to decide, but I'll advise you to have some experimental long-lasting project to test with, and then start applying this approach to your regular projects. I've done the dive to use it in a regular very tightened deadline project, and it was a nightmare. Everything worked out great, but I thought I would have a heart attack - the switch is not that easy :)
I would suggest using DMT for rasterizing your vector assets into Straling sprites at runtime, and it'll also keep your DisplayTree! meaning that you'll still have the parent/child relations that you had in your Flash Assets.
DMT will not duplicate assets, and will rasterize the vectors into texture atlases only one time (Cache is saved)
you can find it here: https://github.com/XTDStudios/DMT
I'm new to web development. I have a small HTML55 game for kids. I was wondering how I can test an HTML5 game? What I need to keep in mind while testing?
How I can test a loading speed? What else I need to keep in mind while testing?
Thanks!
You should keep in mind different things:
Is the game intuitive? (controls)
Is the game smooth?
Is your UI not too full of elements?
Is the user well-guided in your game, can he get stuck easily or not?
For loading speed, there is different libraries and so, but this one seems nice: https://github.com/mrdoob/stats.js
Test every browser and OS you can get your hands on. Test mobile devices as well. In fact, you should absolutely make SURE it runs on mobile. Go as far as to create specific pages designed to fit mobile screens.
I'm making a flash app for AIR. The app is mostly made, but I'm not happy with rendering speed on mobile (render mode - gpu).
I know there is a framework that allows user-friendly way to work with Stage3d called Starling, but I've never used it.
After looking into it and following through some tutorials I've noticed that I need to rename all package flash default classes, e.g flash.display.DisplayObject -> starling.display.DisplayObject.
But such action might be destructive to my code base, plus, I have other frameworks attached that work with some flash package classes.
Is there a way to attach Starling to a complete project without re-naming all the package names, changing assets and re-factoring all frameworks that work with default AIR API?
If you're thinking of switching to Starling, you'll have to redesign your whole rendering code. Starling is no drop-in solution. Just renaming classes in your existing code will not do because it completely replaces flash display list for Direct3D, which does all it's rendering with GPU, with all the differences it brings: bitmapped graphics, texture atlases, careful draw ordering. Learning curve can be a bit steep in the beginning but once you get familiar with basic concepts it's a breeze to work with.
IMHO, it's well worth the effort, especially on mobile. Code that ran in low 10s of FPS in classic display list can easily be made to run at solid 60fps with Starling. Basically, for flash on mobile, Stage3D is the only game in town. And Starling is the best supported and widely accepted framework for 2D stuff on Stage3D, with lots of supporting libraries and a very helpful community of developers.
Go on, take the plunge, you won't regret it.
You can run Starling and a native flash application layer at the same time but it wouldn't give you an optimum experience.
If you want to take full advantage of the gpu acceleration of Stage3d and Starling though it would be preferable to refactor your existing code to use Starling display objects rather than Flash display objects.
You might want to post this question on the Starling forum, they are very helpful guys and it's a thriving developer community! - http://forum.starling-framework.org
I'm here to ask for help.
I'm trying to implement a simple Slots (casino) game for Android and iOS in html5.
My company asked me to look at frameworks that will speed up development.
So I've chosen KineticJS, because of good design and tutorials.
The project is mostly completed, but there is an issue:
it runs great on the iPad and iPhone5 but not so good in Android.
At the very least it must run on Android 2.3.
I used the kineticjs library to increase development speed and surely it helps, but the price for that is rather harsh.
I changed most of my Kinetic.Image objects to Kinetic.Shape, and it kinda helped performance a bit.
Also I stripped down some of the unused variables and now I'm using
this format: (var i =0, ln = something.length; i < ln; i++) for loops.
I realize there is also a cache but I am kinda scared of losing control, since I am still developing it.
What else can I optimize to help solve this situation?
Maybe stripping down some of the highlights and animations in Android.
The worst situation so far is the loading of the client itself on Android.
It doesn't load on first load very well, sometimes it position objects incorrectly.
Well if you know any magic tricks to speed up Kineticjs game, then please let me know.
Sorry but I can't provide a demo right now, since I am still developing and it will affect testing.
Thanks!
My colleague and me made an HTML 5 iPad game ( http://braille.gandzo.com/ ) and we would like to upgrade it, and our framweork is not enoguh, for what we want. Some of the things we would change are: graphics update, animations/"effects", multi-player, achievements and so on. The game would stay 2d. Now, as far as I understand, both Unity and Cocos would be good for this task, with Unity having the advantage of being multi-platform.
What I want to know is are there unknown qualites/"flaws" to these two programs which would influence my decision (maybe even by choosing something else). Examples that come to mind are "Unity is too complicated/has too much unneeded options/hoops because it's made with 3d in mind" or "Cocos is significantly more suited for 2d games".
If the game is pretty much in 2d... I would suggest for cocos2d. I am working on cocos2d for past 1 and half years... I don't have experience in Unity but ya my colleagues who used to work on Unity had so many problems with animation, texturing etc.
BTW I was not able to play you game on my Chrome. :)