Construct2 a short opinion.

Everything said here is based in my opinion, so please don't take it as if it was the absolute truth.

Hello everyone, well...its been a year since i started using construct2 as a game engine, i have to say that its an awesome game engine! its pretty easy to make a good game and i love how it works!

I fully recommend construct2 to people who are starting in the game industry and want to create a awesome 2d game for a computer but unfortunately the problems come when you are trying to do a mobile game,and the problems are really important cause its about perfomance,

i know that theres a lot of companies and people working in html5 games perfomance and you can use Cocoonjs or Crosswalk to improve the perfomance.

In serious talk, for the moment we unfortunately cant develop a fully html5 game with construct2, My team and i are working to create a fully complete mobile game using construct2 but with the low perfomance We have reached doing a lot of work in the perfomance during 1 year of development we cant run a smoothly game in even 30 fps in a normal phone, of course one of those new smarthphones can run a construct2 game in perfect framerate of 60fps but the problem its that Not everyone have one of the last smarthphones and thats a really important problem, how WILL good games from construct2 users compete in the market againts apps that can run smoothly in any phone? of course i love construct2 but we have to face the problem, html5 isn't YET a fully engine to create a mobile game and the only way we can keep working in our project its to grab all the capx and hire someone who knows Unity3D and translate our game and thats not what we wanted to do, we would like to keep the work using construct2 but i ll have to face it too, we will never going to have a perfomance problem using such engine as Unity3D.

I expect that in a near future (hopefully this year) we can run smoothly a construct2 app so we can make awesome games using this awesome tool.

<img src="http://s2.subirimagenes.com/imagen/previo/thump_8778494algun-dia.png" border="0" />

i also hope one day this option will be updated!

cheers!

It's really odd that your judging old phones and new phones based on C2 performance. In practicle design that same development optimization barrier is the same for all developers.

Also an interesting tidbit of information is that a lot of games are built to run at 30fps not 60fps. It's just the logic is handled at 30.

Take a game like Watchdogs. it's built to run at 30fps and that's on the PS3, 360 and WiiU. But the same standards apply to mobile games too. How many of those mobile games actually run at 60fps? and how many run at 30fps but were smart about animation speed with logic.

None of us here know what your game rendering style and logic handling is doing. So we really can't say. There is also no known large mobile games with C2 to use as a measuring stick.

However all I have is my old Tegra2 android device with my large point and click & adventure. And since all the animation was rendered at 24fps(classic double frame) and actually draws at 12fps(when cutting the double frame) all our animations look butter smooth. So while most of the time game runs in high 20fps range and dips to 16fps. The game plays smooth right through.

Our benefit was that it's not action game though. So we can sit with very unoptimized position with a res of 1940x1280 and let the game scale. Now if we optimized that would be a different situation.

Personally I think you should put all your EveryTick logic into a Function calls. Put those functions into a every 0.033 tick for 30fps.

Grab R0j0hounds canvas. On every 0.33 show all the game play laters, render to the canvas, then hide all the game play layers.

Take this as a short opinion. No one complained watching movies at 24fps for being slow and stuttering(which they aren't). So why do expect games to be at 60fps? In fact running games at a lower FPS means MORE DETAILS.

If your game is bottlenecked on GPU rendering then Unity3D or any other native engine wouldn't be faster and you're only facing the limitations of mobile hardware in general as opposed to a Construct 2 limitation. Native developers struggle with this too and often use pretty crazy tricks to get things working. We discussed this type of thing in this blog: https://www.scirra.com/blog/112/remember-not-to-waste-your-memory

Construct 2 makes it especially easy to overload limited mobile GPUs, since it makes it very easy to use loads of artwork and layers.

If it's bottlenecked on CPU then we might be able to optimise our engine to be faster. If you send us the .capx of your game we can do some profiling work and see if any parts of the engine could be sped up.

Either way if the latest phones run it just fine at 60 FPS then that bodes well for the future - in a couple of years when that's the new low end, problem solved!

im not judging old phones and new phones based on C2 performance, im telling that its very hard to get a good perfomance in a mobile phone with a C2 game and only the new devices can handle those games.

ashley i would like to send you our Capx to see if you can help us cause we wont like to translate our project to a new engine, we already make a test in unity and runs very smoothly but we would like to keep working with construct2, from where i can send you the capx? any email special email?

My game is quite complex with lots of massive sprites, physics and 720p background with transparency (pretty much everything against good "mobile practice") and it runs flawless on devices with tegra 3 onwards, which I consider fine, because tegra 3 is pretty weak on the CPU side. Compiled through CocoonJS. It works much better than I had expected, which is me being very grateful for Scirra and Ludei.

[TUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYAgKijfwiU[/TUBE]

I've tested it on a Samsung S3 class device or newer phones run it at 60 fps.

Personally I think its fantastic that HTML5 gaming is so viable now on mobile devices. As we progress towards newer devices, it won't be an issue anymore with low performance.

Also, I had the opportunity to test the html5 directly through a Nexus 7, and it ran at 60 fps before compiling. So the future looks very bright for html5 gaming. Mobile advances really quick, hardware seem to be twice as fast every year.

Edit: Ofc I had to sacrifice a lot of visuals to get it to run smooth on older devices, in my own experience, WebGL effects in construct 2 destroys performance utterly. So do not use it everywhere. An example, I had a scenario where my fireflies used the effect GlowHorizontal, and with only 10 of them on screen FPS was cut in half on a tegra 3, becoming unplayable. So i compromised and used additive blending with some transparency sprites and it maintains a "glow" look without any performance hit.

Edit2: One of the reasons I have not been impressed with Intel's new Crosswalk XDK is the inclusion of ~20MB of overhead into the APK. Mobile devices can chew through high resolution texture sprites easily these days, but with the 50MB limit on app size, it's a SIN to have 40% of the app being XDK overhead.

IJCT have you tried using Construct 2's "debug layout" feature to see what in your game uses the most CPU (look under the "profile" tab in the debugger)?

IJCT - send it to ashleyopf@scirra.com and I could take a look.

Ashley

thx i ll send you the capx, for accident i send the capx before to the support email because i didnt find any way to send it to you.

russpuppy

of course! its help us a lot.

— out of topic, your game looks awesome! :)

— out of topic, your game looks awesome! :)

Thanks. When I had started I knew the limitations of older mobile devices so I never went out of my way to design the game around it, knowing full well how fast mobile hardware advance year to year.

This game took me about 8 months to make. By the time its release, I knew most of the market will be on tegra 3 or samsung s3, iphone4 class or above.

I think the take home message is that Construct 2 is really awesome, but older mobiles are extremely weak, so from the start of game development you have to consider the minimum specs you want to aim for and design the game entirely around that.

i will sound a bit cynic but my quad core lg 4x hd using a tegra 3 chip now sells for less than 200e. if someone cannot afford a phone in this price range i highly doubt they will spend any money buying a game.and if they do it will be angry birds...

so in my opinion performance is starting to be a non significant factor.

the problem lies in available customer income vs quality of a game.

look at ios vs android sales.if you can decode the reason behind the numbers it all makes sense considering the fact that are many times more android phones out there. ios phones cost in general 3 times more than the average android phone( emerging consumer countries like china ,india etc sell the under 150$ models by millions)meaning that their owner probably has a better financial background and thus will spend more money in software.

and in the end of the day if you only had a budget of lets say 15$ for games ,what games would you buy? ray-man jungle run or our game?

but if you had a budget of 100$ then you would try and find that hidden jewel somewhere in the store.

so,from a business point of view it does not make sense to target lower spec devices .they don't spend money anyways so why bother?

i will sound a bit cynic but my quad core lg 4x hd using a tegra 3 chip now sells for less than 200e.

Exactly this, you nailed it. For In-App purchases or buying games, there's not much incentive to develop games specifically targeting older devices. But if you use adverts as a stream of income, then you must cater to as many devices as possible. Free game + Ads need a much wider reach, even if cheap people on older stuff won't buy it, at least they play it.

As we move forward, performance is going to be moot. NV's new K1 or Intel's new Atom is a massive leap in performance. Then there's the new Snapdragon, Exynos and Apple chips due soon.

and if they do it will be angry birds...

just remember why angry birds its the king in mobile games.

thats what im telling, remember that everyone dont have a super smarth phone, how the c2 users are going to compete againts games like Angry Birds? who runs in every device withouth low frame rate.

and if we keep waiting there will be more games in the stores, games in 3D with ps3/xbox360 graphics, how games that sounds good now are going to sound good in the future?

2D games will always be good as long as they are designed properly. The 3D craze isn't new.

yeah i understand but what im trying to say its that we cant just wait for the new super ultra smarth phones to start publishing our games.