Crosswalk Intel XDK experiences

On another note: Will there be a permament fix for the situation in the near future? I mean, a lot of devices seem to be blacklisted for WebGL by Chromium and thus Crosswalk and this means crappy performance for all those phones, right?

Unfortunately, for me, Crosswalk is the only viable Android Export option as CocoonJS's inability to render Fullscreen Letterbox is a dealbreaker for my game.

kbm

its really funny! i have all your problem.

I don't know how to what hmins says

and i have Galaxy S2. i cant run webgl with crosswalk. and i have problem with cjs.

when i export with cjs, my game dose not work in my phone. but in note 10.1 2012 edition it works fine. is it because its ram?

and why crosswalk get lower ram? is it slower than cjs?

if i enable webgl, is it possible that my game dosent run in my phone because of more ram needing?

and is it harm for phone? why they make this blacklist?

kbm I think hmin refers to the assets folder inside the app_src folder. You can find it downloading the Crosswalk binaries. You'll have to pack your app by yourself without using the intel XDK cloud compiler. Currently there's no way to enable the ignore-gpu-blacklist flag with the Intel XDK.

See here: https://crosswalk-project.org/#documentation/downloads

hmin

Regarding my performance issue. I have a device powered by an Adreno 305 GPU that AFAIK it's not blacklisted and when I check the current renderer with the C2 system expression I get the "WebGL" string (there's no swiftshader on android and I should get "Canvas2D" as a result if I'm blacklisted, am I right?)

I had the performance drop migrating form XWalk5 to XWalk6 but when I test my game on the device browser I don't see any difference between Chrome 34 and Chrome 35.

Since nobody else on this forum noticed it I'll do some profiling on my device.

A little edit:

I read the last pages of this thread and I found a lot of misunderstandings.

hmin is talking about the CrossWalk project, not about the intel XDK cloud compiler based on it.

Joannesalfa: hmin didn't suggest you to use phonegap instead of crosswalk. Since Crosswalk has native support for the cordova extensions you can use them inside it without using the native webview. Unfortunately the double name phonegap/cordova is still generating a lot of confusion.

kbm I think hmin refers to the assets folder inside the app_src folder. You can find it downloading the Crosswalk binaries. You'll have to pack your app by yourself without using the intel XDK cloud compiler. Currently there's no way to enable the ignore-gpu-blacklist flag with the Intel XDK.

See here:

Thanks for your post. I tried self-compiling but failed miserably because setting my path variable got screwed up and I got errors

Anyways, ignoring the gpu-blacklist is not an option for a release build on Android, what other options do we have, then? From what I've read in this thread the Samsung Galaxy S2 and S3 both seem to be blacklisted? These two phones alone represent a significant amount of Android-Users, right? - so just accepting that our Crosswalk-Apps run on these phones only in Software-Rendering doesn't seem like a good option.

Unless someone can convince me of a better way to handle the problem?

EDIT: I managed to get the Crosswalk-System including Python, Ant, JDK etc. up and running but it's giving me errors when I try to compile via make_apk.py

It just says "AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'maxint' error and I'm stuck on this

Samsung S3 and S4 make the bulk of the Android market, S2 is really ancient and its marketshare is quite low. But definitely S3 should be targeted in any Android game.

They have said the next version of XDK will have the option to ignore GPU blacklist. There's still lots of things on their to-do list, we'll just have to be patient.

Hi, I read through all your posts, here I'd like to give some clarifications and background about gpu blacklist issue.

* Why not ignore gpu blacklist in Crosswalk now?

The gpu blacklist was originally ignored by default in Crosswalk. However, about several months, some C2 users reported WebGL running with Crosswalk gets crash on their device due to the buggy gfx driver. Such a crash seems not so good, and Crosswalk is not ignore the blacklist, instead it lets web developer decide if it is on or off via command line options.

EDIT: Chromium introduces the mechanism of gpu blacklist for those devices which don't have a good enough passrate in WebGL conformance test. This mean those devices may trigger some bug or limited feature support in the gfx driver in some condition although most of time they work well.

* How to append the command line option to ignore gpu blacklist?

I am sorry to confuse you with a different context. The approach I mentioned above is in the context of using make_apk.py directly instead of Intel XDK build. With XDK build, there is no way for web developer to add an individual file in assets folder. XDK is working on adding such an option to ignore gpu blacklist for web developer.

* What is the relationship between XDK build and open source Crosswalk?

Crosswalk is a HTML5 app runtime to run web app. It supports the HTML5 standard API and features without phonegap APIs and plugins support. XDK build uses a Crosswalk variant as the backend engine. This Crosswalk variant integrates phonegap APIs and plugins based on the open source Crosswalk project. For simplicity, we call both of them as Crosswalk.

So if you web app depends on phonegap API or plugin, you can't build a workable web app by use of make_apk.py. The make_apk.py is only useful for 'pure' HTML5 app.

[BTW: since I have no enough reputations to paste URL and pm some of you. Sorry for no reply if you PMed me:)]

kbm

its really funny! i have all your problem.

I don't know how to what hmins says

and i have Galaxy S2. i cant run webgl with crosswalk. and i have problem with cjs.

when i export with cjs, my game dose not work in my phone. but in note 10.1 2012 edition it works fine. is it because its ram?

and why crosswalk get lower ram? is it slower than cjs?

if i enable webgl, is it possible that my game dosent run in my phone because of more ram needing?

and is it harm for phone? why they make this blacklist?

The crosswalk and cjs (canvas+) have different implementations for webgl support. I don't think the failure running your game app on Note 10.1 was caused by memory consumption, maybe a buggy gfx driver to support some feature required by webgl. You can capture some logs by adb logcat to see if there is some suspicious error message.

Hi, I read through all your posts, here I'd like to give some clarifications and background about gpu blacklist issue.

* Why not ignore gpu blacklist in Crosswalk now?

The gpu blacklist was originally ignored by default in Crosswalk. However, about several months, some C2 users reported WebGL running with Crosswalk gets crash on their device due to the buggy gfx driver. Such a crash seems not so good, and Crosswalk is not ignore the blacklist, instead it lets web developer decide if it is on or off via command line options.

* How to append the command line option to ignore gpu blacklist?

I am sorry to confuse you with a different context. The approach I mentioned above is in the context of using make_apk.py directly instead of Intel XDK build. With XDK build, there is no way for web developer to add an individual file in assets folder. XDK is working on adding such an option to ignore gpu blacklist for web developer.

* What is the relationship between XDK build and open source Crosswalk?

Crosswalk is a HTML5 app runtime to run web app. It supports the HTML5 standard API and features without phonegap APIs and plugins support. XDK build uses a Crosswalk variant as the backend engine. This Crosswalk variant integrates phonegap APIs and plugins based on the open source Crosswalk project. For simplicity, we call both of them as Crosswalk.

So if you web app depends on phonegap API or plugin, you can't build a workable web app by use of make_apk.py. The make_apk.py is only useful for 'pure' HTML5 app.

[BTW: since I have no enough reputations to paste URL and pm some of you. Sorry for no reply if you PMed me:)]

Thanks a lot for your quick response! Really awesome to speak directly to a Crosswalk-Dev.

Anyways, does that mean that I basically can't use Crosswalk without Intel XDK because it doesn't fully support Construct 2 [with plugins and all]?

On another note, you say that the next XDK release might give us an option to turn off the blacklist, but you also said that doing so may lead to crashes or even brick the phone. Maybe I'm naive but wouldn't a better solution be to manually remove specific phones from the blacklist, such as the mentioned Galaxy S3 and S4? Turning off the whole blacklist seems very brute-force.

Anyways, does that mean that I basically can't use Crosswalk without Intel XDK because it doesn't fully support Construct 2 [with plugins and all]?

No. Intel XDK can help build your app for PhoneGap API support, and you can also use Crosswalk directly by use of make_apk.py packaging tools if PhoneGap API is NOT used. Generally, Crosswalk also fully support Contruct2 library and its plugins (both of them are pure JS libraries).

On another note, you say that the next XDK release might give us an option to turn off the blacklist, but you also said that doing so may lead to crashes or even brick the phone. Maybe I'm naive but wouldn't a better solution be to manually remove specific phones from the blacklist, such as the mentioned Galaxy S3 and S4? Turning off the whole blacklist seems very brute-force.

Don't over-worry about that. The potential crashes caused by a buggy gfx driver is somewhat a kind of software level error. You should test your app carefully on a backlisted device to make sure it won't trigger such an error.

See my above update:

EDIT: Chromium introduces the mechanism of gpu blacklist for those devices which don't have a good enough passrate in WebGL conformance test. This mean those devices may trigger some bug or limited feature support in the gfx driver in some condition although most of time they work well.

Thanks for clearing that up for me, hmin ! Unfortunately I get the "AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'maxint' " error and make_apk.py doesnt work. I have no idea what the problem is, my setup/paths seem to be alright and I followed the instructions in the documentation step by step.

Anyways, thanks again and I'm looking forward to future updates!

hmin

I can not re produce the issue, but when I do I will screenshot it! Thank you.

Another question, is when could we see push notifications by using Crosswalk? That show up on the users toolbar

hmin

Another question, is when could we see push notifications by using Crosswalk? That show up on the users toolbar

Do you have a try to a 3rd party phonegap plugin for push notification? see github.com/phonegap-build/PushPlugin

Thanks for clearing that up for me, hmin ! Unfortunately I get the "AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'maxint' " error and make_apk.py doesnt work. I have no idea what the problem is, my setup/paths seem to be alright and I followed the instructions in the documentation step by step.

Anyways, thanks again and I'm looking forward to future updates!

Could you please paste the whole error message to here, including the callstack printed by python? Thanks.

Exit problem is again here in latest XDK

Hello hmin,

I am using the latest XDK compiler BETA Crosswalk 6.35.131.6 on Cordova 3.4.0 and the latest Construct 2. When running the APK on an Alcatel Fierce One phone I get a crash. The crash happens when the game tries to play any sound effect. Streaming music works fine on this phone but as soon as any sound effect plays the game crashes and exits immediately. If I do not play sound effects the games runs fine. The exact same build runs perfectly fine on a Samsung Galaxy 4 and plays sound effects fine.

I do not have an extensive Android handset collection on hand but this crash worries me as to how many other phones this will be a problem with. Do you guys run unit tests on many handsets with XDK/Crosswalk?