Other than just sniffing browsers and telling anyone not using Chrome tough luck on purpose (75%+ of the internet?), I’m looking for different options to make an executable out of a canvas game, if that’s even possible.
The idea is to control the performance of my game by including v8 to users who don’t have chrome installed…..is there a way to interface with it?? Something like a web “wrapper” like Flash’s plugin so you could install a v8 “plugin” cross browser???
The canvas game works with safari and firefox, but at 50-60% of the performance experienced in google chrome.
Another discrepancy is with Firefox if I make the game map more than 100×100 tiles, it chokes when generating the map and gives a “stop script” popup, if you hit “continue” it throws another popup for “out of memory, close your stuff to prevent data loss”.
Using the same code in Chrome or safari, I tested maps with 500×500 tiles (yes that is 250,000 tiles, where firefox choked on 10,000 tiles….) which runs smoothly/consistently in both Chrome and Safari, though safari is 60% of the frame rate chrome manages.
I haven’t yet found a limit to what chrome can handle, and using culling to only draw tiles around the view it’s the same frame rate with 250,000 tiles as it was with 100 tiles (more than 200fps in chrome with 250k tiles!!!!! small view though), the only thing that changes performance is the size of the canvas element/view. Meanwhile Firefox can’t even calculate the zones, let alone draw all the tiles inside the proper zones. (it does work over 100fps with maps 10k tiles or less)
It’s tempting to allow anyone with a browser that supports html5 to play the game, but at the same time, user’s opinion of your game will be MUCH MUCH MUCH better if the PERFORMANCE IS TWICE AS GOOD as the crappiest version that “can” play your game.
I’m reading about V8, and how you can incorporate it into your own c++ applications, or run it standalone?? Has anyone developed a wrapper to make a self contained executable for html5 canvas games?? Or a web wrapper to embed an interface to V8 or something???
I just installed chrome myself this week, after trying to target as many browsers as I could in the past, and it changed the way I think, now it’s just not as good once you’ve had over 200fps to then play the same game with under 100fps…………..And as much as I’ve thought it was idiotic to require chrome (seen lots of html5 devs begging people to use chrome) I’ve come to the realization I was ignorant, and now I think the only way to enforce the full potential of my efforts is to drop coverage for all browsers except ones that can output a set level of performance.
Otherwise the only thing I can figure is to make a different version of whatever games I develop for firefox with a smaller viewable window, smaller map, etc, then on other browsers, check performance and scale the view/map size based off what browser they’re using.
Another temporary idea I was thinking of, if a user has google chrome, the game window will be 700x500px on the screen, if they have safari, drop it to like 500x375px to achieve the same frame rate, and if they have firefox the window will be like 400x300px.
At the same time, if a user is playing the game with Firefox, in the 400x300px window, I would include an obvious(blinking? lol) border around the window 700x500px showing how big the game window would be if they were using chrome? Does that sound like motivation? Then they can get a taste of the game, if they like it they might find it worthwhile to install chrome to view the full size game????
For IE<9, you can do what you’re after with Google Chrome Frame. This works like a Flash-style plugin, which you can prompt users to install. It isn’t available for Firefox or Safari, as far as I know.
While I’m aware of several frameworks for desktop apps using HTML and Javascript, they generally seem to use WebKit, so I would expect performance to be comparable to Safari at best (Titanium Desktop from Appcelerator is another option, but also WebKit-based).