Ashley's Recent Forum Activity

  • Crosswalk is based on Chromium, so in theory should be as good as the browser. I think they're working through a bug in CW10 at the moment though but it sounds like things are better in CW12.

    CocoonJS had far more issues than Crosswalk, like lack of memory management crashing the game and a bunch of unsupported features.

  • saiyadjin's suggestion of using Process Explorer is a good idea for a far more detailed breakdown of memory usage. I found it can actually display GPU usage and GPU memory too (one of the only tools I've ever found which can!). But it can also break down RAM usage in to things like "WS Private Bytes" (the private working set) which from what I've read is the most accurate measurement for how much that single process is actually using.

    I think Windows' task manager may have changed the measurement it reports at some point. I remember a bug report where someone said Windows task manager indicated it was using something like 600mb of memory, but on my Windows 8.1 it said something like 50mb. I think Windows 8+ reports the private working set size (realistic per-process memory usage) whereas older versions report the full working set size (including memory shared with other processes).

    I found an interesting article explaining more about memory measurements here: http://cybernetnews.com/cybernotes-windows-memory-usage-explained/

    Here's an interesting analogy:

    [quote:3buk3t8g]Lets pretend that there are two kids who are coloring, and both of the kids have 5 of their own crayons. They decide to share some of their crayons so that they have more colors to choose from. When each child is asked how many crayons they used, both of them said they used 7 crayons, because they each shared 2 of their crayons.

    The point of that metaphor is that one might assume that there were a total of 14 crayons if they didn’t know that the two kids were sharing, but in reality there were only 10 crayons available.

  • If it's at all possible rest assured we will support it as soon as humanly possible, but note how it depends on Xbox One getting the Windows 10 update, and we don't know when that will be (it could easily be months or longer after the desktop Win10 update). We're keeping the C2 exporters up-to-date so there will be an update in future to support Win10 store apps too.

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  • If you use PhoneGap without Crosswalk then you are stuck with the Android system web view, which is really only good from Android 5.0+. (Android 4.4 has a Chromium webview but it lacks WebGL support so performance will be poorer. I can't remember but it may not even support GPU rendering for canvas2d, since as that bug report shows it's still really slow in 4.4.)

    Crosswalk supports full GPU-accelerated WebGL on Android 4.0+ (if the graphics driver is not blacklisted) so is likely far faster. This is why we recommend using Crosswalk for Android publishing. Once Android 5.0+ is as prevalent as Android 4.0+ is you'll be able to simply PhoneGap it, but until then Crosswalk is essential.

  • This isn't anything to do with Construct 2. It just uses the browser-provided Gamepad API, which is generic and should work with any kind of controller though. However your controller needs to:

    • be recognised by the OS
    • have drivers installed so the OS knows how to communicate with the gamepad
    • report the gamepad to other apps like browsers
    • and the browser may possibly only recognise certain models of controllers, since it has to know in advance how to map its buttons and axes on to the standardised Gamepad API.

    We have no control over any of those steps, so there's not much we can do if a specific gamepad doesn't work. Also IIRC even the official PS gamepads don't have official Windows drivers, so they don't want to officially support Windows gaming. You can get third party drivers, but then there's not much guarantee it will actually work correctly. And then if you're using an unofficial controller just pretending to be a PS gamepad... well, no surprises if it doesn't work.

    The wired Xbox 360 controller is the one we recommend because it's a common controller that is known to just work on most platforms - even Android! I think the Xbox One controller is gaining support too, but I haven't tested one lately.

  • I would be skeptical of OS-level memory measurements. At the OS level, memory management is surprisingly complex, and for various reasons Task Manager can report memory shared with other processes as part of the memory usage of a single process, resulting in inflated numbers or double- or triple-counting the same memory allocations. Also if you have loads of RAM, from the OS's point of view it's like a big really fast cache space, and not using that is a waste. So as long as you are not actually running out of memory, then the OS will use as much RAM as possible, to make best use of that. Often OSs like Windows are accused of "wasting memory", but thinking the OS should keep RAM as empty as possible is similar to thinking that your CPU should keep its L1 cache as empty as possible, just in case you suddenly need to put lots of stuff there, whereas it actually performs far better to fill it up completely and evict unused things if you run out. So if Windows sees you have gigabytes of space free it's going to start filling it up with file caches and stuff to maximise performance. There is a whole cascade of other effects too - like Chrome might decide, why waste CPU time running a GC now if it has room to make several gigabytes of further allocations? There's no pressure at all there.

    So overall the task manager reported numbers are pretty misleading. If you see it using 1 GB RAM there, that does not at all mean it is actually using, or requires, 1 GB of RAM.

    Music is not held decompressed in memory, but sound is. You can easily test the memory impact by turning off 'Preload sounds' and comparing the startup memory use. If you don't preload sounds though, you have to have a whole system of determining when to preload and when to unload the sound effect, and mistakes mean high latency on the sound playback, so I don't really think it's worth the bother.

  • The VM is probably using a special network configuration that doesn't work the same as having the machine on the Wifi/LAN. I think it works something like by simulating a network connection between the VM and host machine. Unfortunately I'm not sure how you'd configure this so the VM can access the same Wifi network in the same way. Maybe there are some networking options in Parallels.

  • — - it's entirely sensible to guide optimisations based on measurements. However I would be amazed if anyone could measure any significant performance difference for the question asked in this thread. Changes on that level are really not important.

  • It's by design - I can't think of many reasons you'd need to update in the background and couldn't do that upon waking up, especially given C2 is mainly a game engine. Also if you do too much work in the background you'll drain the device battery and annoy users.

  • That CPU doesn't look very powerful. I'd go for something 2 GHz+, but on the other hand if your games run well on that system it will probably run well everywhere!

  • Lots of users are successfully publishing to iOS and Android. If notnsane has any specific criticisms I'd be interested to hear them, because AFAIK things are working well at the moment.

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Ashley

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