The Big Question

How does appmobi's 'Direct Canvas' compare to Cocoonjs?

I am very interested in knowing. Tests, thoughts, anyone?

They should both be about equally fast, although because neither supports both platform yet you can only compare different devices, which of course makes it unfair. The real difference is how each platform does publishing. Ludei haven't yet sorted that out though, they're still working on their build system.

If that's the case, I would be interested in seeing some performance comparisons - i.e. the 'how many sprites on screen' test or something like that, perhaps for a range of devices, just to see how much we are 'allowed' to do before encountering FPS drops.

Good idea, I'll do some performance tests at some point. I doubt they'll show up a CocoonJS vs. directCanvas performance difference, but they should still give a good rough idea of sprite counts you can get away with and mobile vs. desktop performance.

Exactly, that would be perfect. You should show mobile browser vs directcanvas/cocoonjs vs desktop performance.

Ashley, something VERY important if possible would also be to compare performance directly with native apps.

I understand javascript will be slower by default, but how much is the question.

sqiddster - as our recent blog post said games are 90% rendering, so once you start using hardware accelerated rendering most of the important differences disappear. Of course our squares-test shows higher performance on native, but that's mainly because the test actually measures the CPU time to issue a draw call.

Are you saying, then, that games exported with these softwares are proven to have performance almost identical to that of native games?

Because that would be amazing.

Well... the best test would be to write Space Blaster in native and compare the framerates. However that's a lot of work!! I think it's best to describe performance as "native-like", because it is using hardware accelerated rendering which is the main (90%) point. However the logic will still be 5-10x slower as usual, but for games that don't have much logic it will be more or less native equal.

Here's my test.

Displaying a simple background image,60 fps (vs. 30 fps Old HTML5 Web Export)

But whenever there is a single sprite moving around it goes down to 10~15fps.

Idk exactly what is this directCanvas,but it's not native.

Yet,wait for a year and I bet HTML5 Games will be playing like native over mobile devices.

SplashHunt, how do you explain the Space Blaster video? I think there are other factors at play here...

which video?

Well, cocoonjs has a video showing space blaster being played at a pretty high frame rate... And Ashley has said directcanvas and cocoonjs are doing pretty much the same thing.

SplashHunt, can you share your .capx file that doesn't perform well? appMobi might be able to improve it.

Hello everyone,

CocoonJS is TRULY running SpaceBlaster game in both iOS and Android (as you can see in this video CocoonJS running SpaceBlaster). Try your game using the CocoonJS Launcher app. You have it available at the Google Play Store and we have just released a way for any developer to download and install the CocoonJS Launcher App for iOS. Please, check our blog post on this: CooonJS Launcher App for iOS.

If you have a licensed Play Construct version, you can download the latest release and you might find the "Export to CocoonJS" option handy too.

Regards,

Ludei