When I put my Flash game into full screen interactive display mode and set stage.fullScreenSourceRect so that it uses hardware scaling, the performance at any resolution seems to be much better than if I do it without the fullScreenSourceRect. I'd really like to use this feature, but the problem is that it seems to be using a 4x blur or some similar algorithm for scaling that leaves everything looking very blurry.
It seems like an odd choice to have a blur as the only available scale mode. I would be much happier with a simple nearest-neighbor. I can't find anything about changing the scale algorithm in the documentation. Is there any way to do this while still using hardware acceleration?
What is the intended platform for this game? If this is mobile, then there are standards that can be implemented to ensure the ideal resolutions. If this is for web then, I would recommend defining rigid dimensions. Otherwise in my experience, its best to develop to your display's ideal native resolutions. Unless you have your code dynamically drawing objects to your stage, the there will always be some kind of rastering/interpolation. You can also get your screens resolutions and have the code make adjustments accordingly: How do I get the user's screen resolution in ActionScript 3?
I've developed a lot of touch screen applications that span multiple displays with different resolutions and AIR has some great options in it's 'Screen' class to make the process easier.
Related
I'm developing simple mobile game for android using cordova. The game is the simple Hidden Object game where player has to find requested objects on the scene. One of my levels had very slow performance. More powerful devices worked fine. I've tried force GPU rendering using translateZ hack and got huge performance boost but, on low-end devices started wired rendering artifacts.
This screenshot is from Meizu U10. The background consists of 3 layers with position absolute, z-index 1,2,3. Objects to find (Cow, chicken etc) has same position absolute and z-index depends from background they are related to. If run game in browser on the same device, there is no artifacts and performance just great. Google did not give me any useful clues, so i will be very appreciate any guesses and tips.
Using SVG can be an option you might need to consider, specifically inline SVGs.
Using inline SVG is beneficial to the performance of a website because
it eliminates the HTTP request needs to load in an image file. Since
no file needs to download, this results in smaller loading times for a
page. This makes your website appear faster to visitors, improving the
user experience.
You should really consider using a webGL rendering engine such as PixiJS if you want to have performance in your games. You would just have to convert your images into textures.
I like to use a lot of unique graphics on my pages, which often results in making different page sizes depending on available screen width/height.
Here are two examples:
http://www.uvm.edu/~areid/homesite/ - the image floats at the bottom of my screen but on a larger browser, the image floats near the middle making it look off. It looks best when the bottom of the window aligns with the bottom of the image
www.stevenlebel.com - it loads two different pages depending on what monitor size is detected.
This seems like a lot of redundant coding. My question is, how can I make sliced/Photoshop images transition well to different screen sizes. Does Photoshop allow you to make DIVS instead of tables?
Can i make each of the slices created by Photoshop grow/shrink when the browser window size changes?
If anyone has any input on creating websites like this I would be very interested to hear what they have to say.
Thanks
Katie
Using a combination of media queries with properly selected breakpoints, sprites or individual images, and even a library like foresight.js you can achieve the results you're looking for.
The media queries will allow you to set up your site for different screen groups with breakpoints set to cover most tablets, phones, etc. You could then load a different image version from a sprite or a separate image entirely. Finally, foresight.js will look at screen resolution and available bandwidth to load higher resolution images for retina browsers if so desired.
set the page size as
.page
{
width:100%
margin-left:auto;
margin-right:auto;
}
Take a tour on mediaqueri.es and find out how others have solved your problem and don't forget dribbble also. I think you know about web designing for PCs, others are smart phones, tablets and TVs. Get some basic understanding of the user interfaces of apps on mobile OSes. Read the Android Design, App Design Strategies for iOS and Designing UX for apps for Windows 8. After that I think you'll have a proper design to solve your question. Then learn about css3 media queries, start coding with html5boilerplate and start from the mobile design. Good luck!
I'm fairly new to web development (but not programming) and needed some advice:
I am working on a mobile app using HTML5, CSS, and Javascript (and Cordova for device functionality).
The app will be similar to flashcards (those things you used to use as a kid to memorize things). There will be some animation (flipping the card over), etc. but for the most part, the design of the flashcard will be static (borders with the main content in the center).
What would be the best way to proceed with that (drawing on a canvas or using an image for each flashcard? I am interested in performance and visual considerations of the two.
It really depends on the type of animation the cards will be doing, if they are flipping on the x/y axis you could simply have the image and manipulate its size/flip it etc with JS.
In my experience these kind of calculations/animations are quicker (if you want it to be compatible across multiple devices) however any more complicated animations should use the canvas - I have noticed when creating adverts for smartphones the canvas can really slow some animations down.
I have started learning some web development lately and have noticed lot's of sites just use Pixel dimension to specify sizes of thins as well as the overall size of the body.
This seems counter intuitive to me (maybe because I am used to programing for Android)
But this could make the website a pain to view on lower res screens and less useful on higher end screens.
Is this really the way things are done? Does this not cause to much problems?
Thanks.
EDIT: how would one go about implementing a less fixed size site?
There are pros and cons to doing things like this.
Pros: It allows you to have full control over where everything is placed as sometimes with relative sizing things will move in unexpected ways.
Cons: Well you mentioned them! Different size screens will give the site a different look.
But overall to some people it is more important that everything remains in the right place than that everything looks great on all screen sizes. Ultimately it depends on the preference of the designer. Also remember that uses on higher resolution screens can zoom in and those on lower resolutions can zoom out!
Peaces and pears.
Each to their own, so long as they are consistant and know what they are doing that is all that matters.
I have recently starting using grid templating which uses pixel dimensions for containers and I really enjoy it. Considering that 960.gs (960px) is an accepted size width for a website, if you know that you do not want to develop a fluid template, then why not use fixed width pixels.
If I am going to have a mobile version of my phone, then I serve the mobile version not my 960px website, and in any case, most phones intuitively display websites anyway. (At least the latest phones, obviously not the old Nokia 8210's ;).
I know you can fake full screen by expanding a window and eliminating the title bar , status bar , and other stuff, I'm not interested in this, I want to know about "real" full screen mode (I don't know how to call it else) , like in games.
what exactly is full screen mode?
what win-api should I use to achieve this?
can this be used to play movies in full screen ? I know windows media player uses a fake full screen because I can "cut" thru it and see the desktop (using regions win-api).
can I "cut" thru "real" full screen like I thru a window (using regions win-api) ore is this directly writing to video memory and there is nothing "under" it?
Thanks!
If you want to make games on Windows in full-screen, the best option is XNA. This uses DirectX underneath, but hides a lot of the implementation details and plumbing to make it easy for the developer to start working on his game.
XNA is freely downloadable, and has good documentation.
XNA Game Studio 4.0 can be downloaded here.
...and you might want to support the "fake" fullscreen mode in addition to "real" fullscreen - it's very nice for those of us that run multi-monitor systems.
If you don't want to use DirectX, create window and call ChangeDisplaySettings with CDS_FULLSCREEN flag. OpenGL applications use this way to go fullscreen.
As far as a user is concerned, full screen is just when a window takes up the entire screen such that they no longer see any window borders or other desktop stuff.
As you know, not all full screens are created equal.
'proper' full screen is where the program takes control of the screen. When a game uses this mode, it can change the resolution of you screen. If you have ever played an old game and existed to see your icons all messed up, this is; for the duration of playing the game, your desktop was at a lower resolution.
with 'borderless full screen' the program window is striped of any borders, the title bar and frame etc., and is just a rectangle of pure rendering. If you then set this rendering context to be the same size as your desktop, you get the effect of full screen.
Doing border-less is usually the more user friendly way these days, as it is easier to 'tab out' as the other programs are still graphically around. 'proper' full screen gives you full control of the hardware, so in theory you have more power for your program, but it means you have to wait for things to reinitialise when you tab out.
what you do with your rendering context is up to you, so yes, you can use it play videos. It would not matter if you are in 'proper' full screen or not, the rendering code would be the same.
As for cutting through proper full screen windows, I am not sure, but I think there would be nothing else to see, there is only your program.
as for what win-api, there is only one windows api, but I think you mean, what windowing library; as this is getting to be a long answer already, I shall just say it depends a lot on what you want from it.
Please feel free to leave comments if you need me to clarify or expand on any points.