I'm building an ad in Flash that has a lot of looping MCs playing at once. When I run a greensock command, it runs fine in Flash, but in the browser it only plays the last frame of the tween. Without a lot of trial and error, is there a way to know what are the first things I should try to improve performance?
If I were you I'd use a profiler to try and see A good tool that you could use to try and see where the problem is Adobe Scout. It will help you identify any bottlenecks or where in the code you may have a problem.
Certain IDEs feature profilers as well including FlashDevelop (free) and Flash Builder ($$$).
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I have problem on my game after I build it and install on my device it's lagging and has low fps(I tested on different devices and everywhere is the same). I tried unity's built in profiler which shows that everything is fine and always displays 100(or more) fps. So I think profiling game after installation can help me, but I can't find any proper profiler to use and can someone give me any suggestion?
Thanks in advance
Unity's profiler is still a valid tool. You can find the slow parts in your scripts.
The main difference on mobile devices are bad graphic cards.
To have good performance on those cards you need to bring down the polygon count and number of draw calls.
You find those infos in the stats window of the Game tab.
Also mobile shaders and baked lighting helps.
Find more hints in Unity's Mobile Optimization Guide.
Look at Graphy plugin. May be it will be useful in your case.
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/gui/graphy-ultimate-fps-counter-stats-monitor-debugger-105778
I have a Processing sketch that will be running in a gallery setting soon. I'm considering porting the sketch to processing.js, but I am unsure if you can use the toxiclibs libraries in processing.js.
Thanks.
If it's going to run a gallery soon and everything works fine, don't change anything yet just to have everything working as expected:"If ain't broke, don't fix it"
When porting code over to processing.js some functions might be slower or not implemented so best not to take a chance at this point. In the future however if you plan to use processing.js and toxiclibs, you can use the toxiclibs.js port
I saw a cool video of someone coding a NES emulator. If you watch it, you see that there are no pauses, no hesitations, .. He gives a bit of information on how this is done on his site. The idea is based on tool-assisted videogame speedruns.
Does anyone know tools that can be used to create a similar effect in a modern IDE, like visual studio? Normal video capture programs like CamStudio don't cut it.
You'll want to capture in high definition so the text is readable.
There's nothing worse than a programming tutorial on YouTube where
you can't read what the guy is typing.
You'll also want to be able to cut out parts of the recording where there is nothing going on. Hesitations and pauses for thoughts for example.
It might be a good idea to switch to a low screen resolution (1024x768 perhaps) and run the IDE in a fullscreen mode so that there is no unneccessary clutter in the video and the code is easy to see.
Take a look at that list SQLGuru created for a video capture program which makes the cut.
I have managed to locate a list of 17 potential apps that could do the trick for you.
check them out here: http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2012/09/17-free-tools-for-creating-screen.html
I have been following the usage of JavaScript for the past few years, and with the release of extremely fast scripting engines (V8, SquirrelFish Extrene, TraceMonkey, etc.) the possibilities of JavaScript have increased dramatically. However, the usage share of Internet Explorer coupled with it's total lack of support for recent standards makes me want to drop a bomb on Microsoft's HQ, as it creates a huge amount of problems for any website.
The game will need to be pretty dynamic client-side, with animations and other eye-candy things, but not a full-blown game like those that run directly in the OS using DirectX or OpenGL. However, this might be a little stretch for JavaScript and will certainly feel extremely slow in Internet Explorer (given that the current IE engine can be hundreds of times slower than SFX; gotta see what IE9 will bring), would it be better to just do the whole thing in Flash? I know this means requiring the plug-in AND I have no experience whatsoever with Flash (other than browsing YouTube :P). It also means I can't just output directly from PHP, I would have to use XML or some other format to pass data to it (JSON is directly integrated in JS and PHP can deal with it easily).
Another idea would be to provide an alternative interface just for IE, though I don't know how (ActiveX maybe? or with Flash, then why not just provide it to all browsers) or totally not supporting it and requiring the use of other browsers, although this is plain stupid from a business perspective.
So here am I, wondering what approach to take and thus asking for your advice. How should I build the client-side? AJAX in all browsers, Flash in all browsers or a mix (AJAX for "modern" browsers and something else for the "grandpa": IE).
I recommend a plug-in platform (Flash, Silverlight, or Java) over AJAX. Having a clean layer of abstraction between your game and the client's browser is a big advantage. In any non-trivial AJAX game look forward to endless corner-cases where browsers differ in performance or implementation.
Personally, I think Flash is easy to learn if you are coming from AJAX experience. Flash is currently the most widely installed and proven plug-in for browser games. However, Silverlight and Java are both building momentum. Also, the Unity engine has become a popular choice for commercial browser games.
I think you shouldn't leave Java out of the equation. It's a powerful, fast language, and with Java applets, you can do almost anything. If you want hardware-accelerated graphics via OpenGL, JOGL can do it, even in an applet.
On the other hand, it might not be right for you. But at this early stage, I think you should evaluate all of your options, and since you have no experience with Flash but sound like you've got a bit of programming experience, you might feel more at-home with Java.
I believe the current answer is Flash game.
Alternatives:
Java Applet: getting less and less common those days and it is not commonly installed as a plugin on many computers.
SilverLight: too new and might vary and change in time. not commonly installed on many computers and it's Microsoft (whom tends to change technology every 2 years ...)
JavaScript / AJAX: Still a new kid on the block, it's on the rise it is true with many nice features, but still lack of good cross browser for IE even IE8, can not play sounds internally, still slower than the others, and you don't know where will it evolves.
Eventually probably the best solution for now is Flash development:
Cross platform. Works fast. Long time already alive and have a lot of support.
I hope this answer will change in the next year. Happy Peasach.
Check out Jmonkey. The "plugin" loads if you have Java on your machine. Once it's cached, the next time the visitor goes to the page, it your game loads very quick. Check out their website for demos and see what I mean: http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/
Oh, I forgot to say, it's a 3D scenegraph Java engine. I just tried it again, and it loaded in linux. Looks they've put in some good work.
Don't do it with javascript in the browser. And Flash really can be a pain just because it's closed source and you don't know if you've made a mistake or found a bug - speaking from experience. I'd never want to make another Flash game again.
How about using RaphaelJs , it is a Javascript library that make dinamyc images using SVG, and for IE, it try to make those images using the IE alternative: VML. Im using it on my own WebGame, but i dont really make complex graphics in it. The most complex thing done on RapahelJs was a heath map (20 * 20 tiles ) with a dinamyc opacity slider. An it work with jquery without any problem or configuration!
Suppose I'm writing a 2d tile based MMORPG.
Furthermore suppose I hate flash.
Lastly, suppose I only need my code to run in the latest safari, latest firefox, and latest chrome.
What are the limits to what I can and can't do? (Are there examples of good game engines that only require a recent web browser)?
Look into HTML5 Canvas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_element
The latest versions of the browsers you mention already support it.
Check out the Unity3D engine: http://www.unity3d.com
Cross-browser, cross-platform, although your users would have to download the unity browser plugin...
There's also the Raphaël javascript library...it does a very nice job of abstracting a lot of the heavy lifting you'd have to do otherwise! The memory footprint seems decently light as well (from my small-scale playing around with it anyway).
For something that works for the user, OOBE (without add-ins etc); Javascript is probably the only unified functionality that exists between all browsers.
The browser is surprisingly quite capable (at least Chrome is), this is something that Google Chrome is attempting to promote (see http://www.chromeexperiments.com/). Notice some however, that experiments are often laggy or unworkable in other web browsers.
As for a list of things that are and aren't capable; that would take a fair while to compile.
In regards specifically to a 2D tile based game, I wouldn't say it isn't possible, but it may be quite difficult to create. As mentioned before, most browsers (apart from the stand-out; Google Chrome), suffer from limited resources. Therefore resources wise, it may be difficult to implement and would defiantly require a lot of requirement fore planning.
Java applets are also possible...
You could also move to 3D. While it does require a plug-in (although is being integrated into Chrome), the results are undeniable.
"O3D is an open-source web API for creating rich, interactive 3D applications in the browser." http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/. The video is quite amazing actually -- especially the live map editing (e.g. removing sprites).