Construct 2 True Stress Test

Ashley

I remember once Ashley posted a thread claiming that C2 can easily handle 75,000 sprites on screen at a time.

I looked at that and said, "Damn, impressive! Construct 2 is the program for me."

I know now that this is completely false because it was a little test, showing one little function in isolation, without all the other features a typical game has, like music for example, so it was completely mis-leading.

The true limit, at least for my current game seems to be way less than 1,000.

This became very obvious when doing the Android build after I added decent sound track (the file wasn't that big).

The game all of a sudden started struggling with a very noticeable slowdown, so I had to reduce the number of spawning stars to maintain a normal frame rate. There are no memory leaks in the capx, cpu utilization is only about 30% max, and the coding for something so simple is as good as it gets.

It made the game look better than anything (since I had so much going on), so I kept the original stars with their deep parallax effect for the rank table.

But could this have anything to do with the browser architecture?

It's not the cell phone for sure, because even the cheapest Android phones from best buy now have 16 to 32 GB memory and the game only uses about 136 megs for the main portions (200+ for the cinematic).

So, Ashley's decision to use the browser architecture as the main component for his engine (as opposed to properly interpreting into C or C++) had nothing to do with the demand for browser games (maybe from poor kids in Vietnam? But you're not going to monetize those...), but to lessen the programming workload on himself, next to 0, so he could leach from existing programming/updating efforts. And if that's the best that could be done given the small user base, that's the best that could be done, but at least he could have been upfront about it, as opposed to keeping so many things to himself.

We were never informed, for example, that there is no expansion file capability with C2 and C3? for Google Play, so users are limited to ridiculous sub-100 mb capxs where the operating system in the Android build ends up eating most of the space.

So why claim the product can be anything more than for simple proto-typing?

And the little stable or mostly stable games you could make with it can hardly compete with what's out there.

And as opposed to all these false posts claiming "Ashley's a genius", way too busy to deal with our problems, or even post code examples, then there's Ashley's own admission about Construct Classic (back when it interpreted into C) that only portions of the code worked properly, so he couldn't do it right even back then.

That's the bunnymark, almost all engines use it as a benchmark, and yeah it's a silly test that has no real meaning.

Something to think about is that for a majority of developers, it's not about being able to do anything you want, but being able to do something with what you have.

I'm only posting this because I can't figure out why my 7th layout is glitching.

It never glitches when you play it solo....only when it's the nth, nth, nth layout, and it's the friggin Credits Sequence and it only happens in translations.

So, the bug seems to be completely random, it's a blackout in the beginning with a random interval of about 5-15 seconds and it only seems to happen when you run the preceding layouts for a while, listening to the music.

I even remade all the assets in it from scratch to exclude corruptions.

So, this is really, really makes me think it's some quirk of browser architecture (exactly what Radical Panda was saying) and/or JavaScript instability (what reputable company makes their games in JavaScript?), and, yes, I'm upset.

It's not the cell phone for sure, because even the cheapest Android phones from best buy now have 16 to 32 GB memory and the game only uses about 136 megs for the main portions (200+ for the cinematic).

They have 16 to 36Gb of INTERNAL STORAGE not MEMORY.

Is it darksunpictures.com the website of your project?

Well, if yes, I'm assuming that you did a similar "best pratic" on your Construct project..

The website index has 66,200 KB.

It is far from something good, if you are doing things similar in your C2/C3 projects please first of all try to understand how everything works and what you should do as best pratics.

Black Screens are almost exclusively WebGl/ram related.

But how do you fix in translation?

If it's ram, then what some browser glitch, because it's swamped with too much ram usage from music streaming/layout switching?

klabundee

And, you're right I goofed about the memory, but still as I said the game doesn't use that much and most phones have 1 to 2 GB easy and games that use way more.

Check this out:

"Back at our company, Q42, we evaluated the current state of Numolition. The core gameplay was good enough be released, which felt really good. What didn’t feel good were the rendering glitches and performance on some devices. Even though most people at Q42 had pretty new Android models and we weren’t doing anything crazy in the code, we wanted the game to run a bit more smoothly than it was."

smashingmagazine.com/2014/04/rebuilding-an-html5-game-in-unity

Anybody know someone with good references who could port a C2 game into Unity? How long would it take? Couldn't offer any upfront money right now. How much would they want on the back end?

I was thinking maybe there was some way to take the HTML 5 export into Unity, but it does not seem to be a simple path at all.

I might do a Craig's list ad for this at some point soon, but I wouldn't trust anybody unless they had very good verifiable video game company references and then again I would start off with a few tests to make sure they could do it.

Also, could all of C2's libraries/effects be translated? My game does not really use anything fancy other than the Warp and Water Ripple effects, which I believe are WebGl, and not sure if those can be readily translated into Unity with C2 settings.

> The game all of a sudden started struggling with a very noticeable slowdown ... cpu utilization is only about 30% max

If the framerate is dropping with only modest CPU usage, that suggests it's bottlenecked on rendering in the GPU hardware. That's a hardware limitation, rather than being anything to do with the software, so even switching to a different tool won't help if your game does the same thing with the GPU. Lots of people blame us for every problem they have even if it's nothing to do with us...

No, that part is fine (I fixed it with fewer stars). I wanted to test on the cheapest most available phone in the U.S.

It's this random, rendering blackout glitch in the beginning of the 7th layout that only seems to happen when you run the other layouts for a while, listening to the music, that bothers me, and that happens on any device, even the laptop I'm currently using, and it was happening on high end graphics workstations I used to use before as well.