Arcade game - mobile phone testing

[Wilf]

Hi,

I wonder if I could ask for some performance feedback for a new game
I'm putting together.

You can find it here: http://gamedev.spacemonsters.co.uk/galactians2/

I'm really only interested in performance on mobile devices.
However if you get choppy performance on the desktop I should probably
do something about it.

I get varying performance when I user a "background imaged" DIV -
despite the image being a small (filesize) .gif
I have no idea why this would be the case.

HTC's Desire HD performs like a train but iOS varies so much it's a
real headache.

In a way I want a before and after snapshot before iOS 5 arrives on
Wednesday.

I will blog any results and will happily credit anybody wishes to be
credited for their time.

Thanks in advance.

Mark
p.s. Z or CTRL to fire and Arrows to shift left and right on the
desktop.

[Michal Budzynski]

Works fine on my palm pre 2. Nice game!

[Bruno Garcia]

On 10/10/2011 07:22 AM, Wilf wrote:
> I'm really only interested in performance on mobile devices.
> However if you get choppy performance on the desktop I should probably
> do something about it.

Neat game! It plays nicely on a Nexus One, though it hangs on the
loading screen in Opera Mobile. Perhaps it isn't worth supporting that
browser, but it might be a quick fix.

A FPS display would be useful for us to share the performance we're
experiencing.

> I get varying performance when I user a "background imaged" DIV -
> despite the image being a small (filesize) .gif
> I have no idea why this would be the case.

I don't think the filesize matters for rendering speed, browsers need to
decompress images to draw them. You could try ensuring that the gif
doesn't have an alpha channel, which could make compositing easier on
the browser, but that's just a guess.

With iOS 5, it might be worth comparing the background div hack to just
doing it all in canvas.

Bruno

[Wilf]

Thanks Bruno.

Just to carry on your thought process I created a simple "game" demo
that renders both DIV/IMG and Canvas.
The canvas version is here: http://gamedev.spacemonsters.co.uk/v2canvas/
and the DIV version is here: http://gamedev.spacemonsters.co.uk/v2div/

I'd be interested to see what kind of FPS people can get from this in
each scenario.

I will put together another test for the full background in both DIV
and Canvas.

Mark

[Michal Budzynski]

Samsung Wave, bada, Dolphin browser (your test thought it was Mobile
Safari:) )

About 27fps in canvas mode and up to 4-5 in DOM. I'm little bit
surprised with this, I always have better results with DOM. Maybe you
can try to move the sprites with -webkit-transform: translate(x, y),
and animate them with -webkit-animation, it should be a way faster
than just changing top & left.

[George Wilson]

I just tried it on an iPhone 3gs with iOS5 and it ran smoothly.  I'll play it some more later and do more testing.

[Luis Montes]

I know you were looking for iOS performance, but it runs like a champ on my tmobile G2.

Nice work!

Luis

[Wilf]

Awesome. Thanks guys.

It's encouraging that in less than 18 months of making these games
I've gone from being restricted in the amount of action I can present
to making some pretty rich arcade action.

The future looks pretty bright for HTML5 arcade games :-)

Looking forward to seeing what others are coming up with.

Mark