Ashley's Recent Forum Activity

  • Is it the same in the Chrome browser? What does Chrome say if you visit chrome://gpu?

  • The point of minification is to make reverse engineering hard, so it deliberately makes this difficult. Why do you want to change that option anyway?

  • NW.js for example has a memory cache nw.exe alongside the main nw.exe, it stores any recently accessed asset into that cache and never lets them go until the entire process is ended (exit game).

    This means if the game has 900MB of images/sprites in memory format, that cache will be ~900MB, even on a minimal main title screen layout.

    Cache is not the same as used memory, which the blog post I linked to covers somewhat. Unused memory is wasted memory, so maybe Chrome or even the OS maintains a cache of the decompressed images, or it's related to garbage collection. The thing about caches though is they can be evicted to free up the memory if the system ends up running low. So in a way it doesn't count - it's not going to make you run out of memory, it just speeds things up when there's spare memory available.

    Of course it's possible there's a C2 bug that is leaking memory (although it seems unlikely by now, with many very large games running just fine for some time). The key is if it crashes due to memory exhaustion, then by all means go ahead and file a bug report. Otherwise it's probably just hanging on to resources in case they're needed again.

  • I have observed when playing (the NW.js export) there are 3 processes (2 of them are background processes) that end up growing as the game is being played. So far in my game it seems to cap out at around 600MB (total).

    If you're looking in Task Manager, those numbers don't even include textures, because they're stored separately in GPU memory. Those numbers can be difficult to interpret too: see understanding CPU and memory measurements.

    [quote:n1tw30yr]sorry if this is a dumb question, but can you explain this "switching"?

    Lots and lots of laptops (even the one I'm typing on now) ship with two GPUs: a low-power, cheap and weak Intel GPU, designed to save battery, and a gaming-grade AMD or nVidia chip to run games fast. Both nVidia and AMD have really crap systems that automatically pick the GPU, and never pick the fast one for indie games, only AAA titles. For a while they wouldn't even let you manually pick the fast GPU for browsers, although I think that is fixed now. So GTA starts up on the powerful GPU and your browser or NW.js probably defaults to the weak Intel chip. Maybe if you got in touch with both of them they could whitelist your game for the powerful GPU, but you have to do it for every game you publish, and it involves trying to talk to a big corporation who probably don't care.

    So you can tell the users to do it themselves: normally there is a control panel that allows users to manually set the GPU for each program. For example on my laptop I can open nVidia settings, go to "Manage 3D settings", and manually add a program to use "High performance nVidia processor". It only lists programs nVidia think are noteworthy by default, so sometimes you have to manually add a program to the list too. However I've seen this alone entirely solve all performance issues with HTML5 games, but it is not the default, and lots of people probably don't know the option exists. So the whole system is kind of rubbish and biased against independent developers, but if you can make sure users are aware they might have a second GPU and may need to manually set the game to use it for it to run well, that might help.

  • The store used to have plugins for sale in it, but it promptly filled up with plugins costing £40 or more IIRC. I was very worried this would create the perception with new users that they would have to end up paying double or even triple the price of a personal license to get the features they wanted. We thought about having a price cap, but then that undervalues ambitious plugins like Q3D. So it got put on the backburner, and like many things on the backburner, quickly got replaced by more urgent matters. We could consider it again, but then if it's full of expensive plugins which the developers are claiming are must-have essentials in their sales pitch, I don't think that would come across very positively to new arrivals. As it stands it's up to third-party developers to distribute plugins themselves and charge for them independently, and it's up to them to announce updates, communicate with users, etc.

  • Use the plugin SDK.

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  • Tilemaps are a lot faster, because they are specifically optimised for tiled rendering. Using lots of sprites will be slower. You also have better editing tools for tilemaps in the editor.

  • Also I've learned about how NW export games load all the layouts into memory and never free any of it

    That's not true, layout-by-layout loading frees images when you change layouts, so it only ever has one layout loaded. See Memory usage.

    If you reduce the size of the window size (misleading name: should be viewport size) and use the same size window with letterbox scale, it will make no difference at all: the same rendering work is done. What does make a difference is reducing the window size and turning on "low quality" fullscreen mode. That renders the entire game smaller, then stretches the final result to the display size. It's almost the same as actually switching the monitor resolution (which would just do the final stretch on the monitor display chip, but GPUs are really fast at stretching things).

    Intel graphics chips suck. They share system memory so have really constrained bandwidth and very low fillrate limits. You have to design games very carefully to work well on them. The good news is many laptops with Intel chips are really dual-GPU and have a powerful AMD or nVidia card as well. If you can make sure everyone switches your game to the powerful GPU, all your performance issues should be resolved!

  • I'm not saying anything will or won't happen for certain. We just want to use web standards where possible.

  • If you have any issues, please file a bug report to the bugs forum following all the guidelines. It is impossible to help or even say anything without a specific description of what is happening and a .capx demonstrating what you're doing.

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  • If you are referring to Ashley, as far as I know he only works on C3 at the moment. Scirra hired a new member to do the updates for C2.

    It's actually the other way round: Diego is working on C3 with me, but I still do maintenance on C2 so it's not left behind.

    ethanpil - several of the features you highlight have existing web standards, e.g. for camera and geolocation. We want to use the web standards wherever possible. Cordova APIs should only be necessary for non-standard stuff like IAP and ads, and maybe push notifications, but web standards are in progress even for that. Even then, for something like ads, there are hundreds of services out there and it's an impossible task to support them all, so in that case it's intended that third party plugins can cover the services we don't cover officially.

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Ashley

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