And I was testing it on iphone 4G with X-climate demo. The results are very good. I get up to 20 fps and that is without prerendering background images. On the previous version the game was barely playabale. It is getting better and better. Almost all the desktop browsers can run it at 60 fps.
Mozilla Firefox 7 is here!
And the developers claim that it manages much better Canvas and JavaScript. Let run some tests on X-climate demo game.
First with 20 fps:
The orange is system lag metric. As explained by the creator of ImactJS which this game is created with:
“This is essentially the time the browser is late to begin processing the next frame. E.g. when the current frame is completely finished after 10ms, the browser should schedule the next frame in 6ms, in order to achieve 60fps.
However, some browser’s JavaScript engines need a very long time to free unused memory (“Garbage Collection”), sometimes amounting to a complete halt of the game for 100ms or more. ”
Well it used to be much more of orange. Now the garbage collection seems to be working quite all right.
My Dell was getting sluggish, so I had to restart. Now we have 60fps results in:
Works like for 5 minutes.The entities move better than I have ever seen. There are bursts of orange, but is does not affect the performance. Computer’s CPU usage is around 20%.
After some minutes Firefox becomes largely non-responsive. CPU usage jumps to 70% and higher. The performance console is all orange. I have no choice but to kill Firefox in the task manager. And switch over to Chrome. The same problem here. CPU usage is a way to high. I had to restart the computer to calm it down. Launch the game and get the same issue. I left computer for the night to struggle with itself.
Next day everything functions normal. The game runs at 20fps.
Will experiment more))
UPDATE
Ok. Here is the clue. FireFox 7 is very good browser and the developers have done a great job. I ran the game at 60fps at my MacMini with 2G RAM and it worked like charm! Mac did not struggle at all. I even did not bother to prerender backgrounds. Safari 5.1 however manged to produce only around 40 fps.
Good work Firefox and bad job Dell, who staffed its Latitude with a junk of hardware!
Microsoft abandons plug-ins in favour of HTML5
“For the web to move forward and for consumers to get the most out of touch-first browsing, the Metro style browser in Windows 8 is as HTML5-only as possible, and plug-in free. The experience that plug-ins provide today is not a good match with Metro style browsing and the modern HTML5 web.”
These words of wisdom come from the chief for Internet Explorer development at Microsoft. Read the rest here.
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Why HTML5 won’t take the wind out of Apple’s sails
An interesting analysis on why apps will survive the HTML5 blow.
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Comic sequences for 3.5 inch devices
Our game will include short comic sequences explaining the back story for the action episodes. The game will be played on all kind devices — it is HTML5 game) — so the question which popped up at our meeting was how to make the comics play good on 3.5 inch devices.
We decided to check whether there are revolutionary ways of viewing comics on small screens. Well, not so revolutionary, but you can view them as regular PDFs, zooming in and out, like when using this app:
Or you can have a more sophisticated way of reading comics on 3.5 inches, but then the comic should adhere to certain rules — no huge splash pages, no oddly shaped panels, text boxes should be neatly placed within a panel etc. Have a look at this app:
iVerse youtube video showing comic reader
Well, I think we go for iVerse solution.
And, have a look at the comic draft our artists have produced. Amazing!
X-climate comic sequence, draft
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Interesting experimental game project by Opera
Opera, the Opera-browser company, has been working on interesting project the past months. That is to transfer a platform game called Emberwind, originally produced by a Swedish game maker TimeTrap, into HTML5.
Both the source code and the game so far can be found in Opera’s Erik Möller’s blog.
It does not seem that Opera was using any of the existing HTML5/javascript frameworks to make the game.
The graphics look smooth and the performance is good.
It seems that Opera took 3d images of the game objects and built 2d versions of them. The sprite sheets in the source files look enormous! No hand job there!
The technique we should apply in our project as well! Will keep you updated on the results.
GameSalad unleashes HTML5 game creator — no coding required
Looks like a toy. But may be useful for prototyping. Seems to be a good tool:
http://gamesalad.com/download/latestCreator
Requires installation and works only on MAC OS X.
X-climate demo is around the corner
Now it is happening! The X-climate demo made with the great and still the best out there ImpactJs HTML5 engine is to be released soon.
Have a look at some of the snapshots from the game play:
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JS and 3D
Although 3D in WebGL support varies from browser to browser and Microsoft even threatens not to support it in the future, there are good projects out there working to create 3D engines for JavaScript:
1. SceneJS
SceneJS is an open source 3D engine for JavaScript which provides a JSON-based API for defining and manipulating 3D scenes on WebGL.
2. CopperLicht
A WebGL library and JavaScript 3D engine for creating games and 3d applications in the webbrowser. It uses the WebGL canvas supported by modern browsers and is able to render hardware accelerated 3d graphics without any plugins.
The list is far from being complete…
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