Ashley's Forum Posts

  • Chrome for Android and Crosswalk are two different things.

    They're based on the same browser engine, so in theory they should work very similarly.

    thundercracker - you didn't mention what it said for WebGL. For best performance it needs a non-blacklisted GPU with hardware-accelerated WebGL support. You should also test in Chrome - you didn't say what browser you used on the S2, and the Android stock browser doesn't even support GPU acceleration so is going to be very slow. Chrome can use GPU acceleration if it hasn't blacklisted the driver, so can be a lot faster. The S2 is pretty old now anyway - it was released over 3 years ago - and old non-Google Android devices are pretty problematic when it comes to GPU blacklisting. Newer devices like the S4 and S5 should perform far better, mainly because their GPUs are not blacklisted. I think Crosswalk will be getting an option to ignore the GPU blacklist soon so that might give you more options for getting things to work better on older devices.

  • No news yet but apparently Intel are working on it and hopefully it will be supported soon.

  • Well, you can use tiled backgrounds if you like, but the editing experience is usually a lot more difficult than using tilemaps, and tilemaps should not perform worse than tiled backgrounds.

    What I want to avoid is having to upload a potentially very large mesh for a very large tilemap object if tiles are modified. Right now that has very little impact since it's only dealing with a mesh for the visible on-screen tiles.

  • — - did you check the browser console? Were there any errors/messages there?

    You also should not add the same product IDs again other than on start of layout, and don't space-separate them (e.g. use "a,b" not "a, b").

  • So it's probably a driver bug or a Chrome issue. I'd suspect a driver bug, especially if other browsers show the same issue.

  • andreyin - does Chrome on the same Mac show the same issue? What does it say if you visit chrome://gpu?

  • Lots of browsers already have GPU-accelerated video decoding.

    I think 8 frames isn't enough for much benefit for video - the memory usage may or may not be lower, but 8 frames of video is likely to have a significant quality impact, since it will probably just have one keyframe then seven delta frames. Video is also designed for long-running media and it may end up just decoding everything fully in to memory anyway if it's short. It could be worth experimenting with though.

    Note your spritesheets will be a lot more space efficient if you use just under a power-of-two size, e.g. 500x500, since spritesheets are power-of-two plus an extra pixel transparent border round each image. So you can only fit 3 tiles of 512x512 across a 2048x2048 spritesheet, not 4.

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  • — - you need to use it the same as the other platforms (e.g. adding product IDs first) - see the manual entry for more info. You will probably also need to make sure you've added the product IDs to the app in the developer dashboard, and enabled IAP permission for your app. Once you've done all that does it work? If not are there any messages in the browser error console?

  • Aphrodite - no, only objects that are initially placed in the layout in the editor. If a different object is created at run-time, it will have to load it at the moment you create it, which could make the game momentarily stutter. To avoid that place any objects you might create just off the layout and destroy them on startup - they'll still be preloaded.

  • If you're talking about making a game with something like clicking (or touching) and dragging along a word in a wordsearch, then matching that word, it's definitely at least intermediate level and not beginner level. You're going to have to get involved with user input and tracking a user gesture, arrays, and pattern matching (probably against a database). As a beginner launching directly in to something at least intermediate level is probably going to be a struggle. I'd still recommend the beginner tutorials even if they're not the kind of game you want to make - they'll give you an impression of how to start using Construct 2, and are indeed easier and more suitable for a beginner level user.

  • Maybe via a Chrome extension API or node-webkit extension, but this is not something web browsers can typically do.

  • The WebGL renderer more or less already does that, but with fewer vertices since it can turn repeating areas in to a single quad. Seamless mode actually turns it back in to a tile-by-tile render, but this is extremely fast even on mobile devices. Your suggestion also raises some fairly thorny new performance pitfalls: when editing the tilemap at runtime it now needs to involve the GPU - either a full or partial mesh rebuild and associated GPU upload. Also it means it has to switch between buffers at runtime during rendering whereas currently tilemap rendering re-uses the highly optimised sprite-batch rendering which allows it to throw tiles in the same vertex buffer as sprites and all the other game content.

    It's already really fast anyway - reducing something that takes maybe 1% of the CPU time to 0.5% is just a waste of time, especially if the improvement does not carry over to the canvas2d renderer, and especially if it has other pitfalls. As the tilemap blog post noted, using customised shaders is probably the ultimate fastest way, but good engineering is always a tradeoff and the current system is both simple and already very fast.

  • Only images used on the current layout are loaded in to memory. Objects on other layouts are not loaded until you go to those layouts, and when you do so, objects on the old layout are unloaded from memory. This prevents large games running out of memory.

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    Closing, please do not ask people to circumvent the license restrictions for you, even for stock games. If you're writing a book isn't that a pretty good reason to get a license?

  • PKrawczynski - why does preloading music matter? Is it important if music starts playing a moment later or in the first touch?