60 fps games made with Construct 2?

Hi,

I just started out making games for Construct 2, and already have a pretty good prototype - awesome!

However, before I spend too much time in finalizing the game, and adding all the flair, I want to make sure that it'll be worth it. I use iPhone, and in Sweden it's near 60% of the market share. By looking at the completed creations forum, it seems most people here develop with Android in mind, am I right?

According to market share stats, around 16% of users still have iPhone 4, which means that they will have iOS 7. The good news is that iPhone 4 is declining, and with the release of iPhone 6, probably even more.

I understand that iOS 8 is much better in handling HTML 5 and web graphics, but my question is - Is it possible to make games with Construct 2, and export them to the App store, and get great performance? To find this out, I'm trying as hard as I can to find well executed high speed action games on the app store, made with Construct 2.

The best (only) I could find so far is Mr. Dot by mollaq (beautiful art design), and it worked great on my iPad 4 (iOS 7) and also iPhone 5 (iOS8) with close to 60 fps.

On my iPhone 4 it was playable, a bit unstable frame rate of somewhere around 15-20, but not a native feel. Sometimes it missed my taps. And this game has mostly one character and a scrolling background. What would a game look like on that device with 20-30 object on screen, and perhaps adding some effects? Is it OK to ignore older phones like iPhone 4?

And the final question, which probably is the hardest one, and suitable for a different thread - which exporting platform should I use? Mr. Dot was made with Cocoon JS / ludei, but there seems to be some impopularity with it while browsing the Construct 2 forums. What other options do I have to make a high performing native like game?

And if you know any well made Construct 2 action packed games in the App Store, let me know. I assume part of the perfomance is based on skill and knowledge too. I'd love to try them out on iPhone 4, 5, 6 and iPad 4 and let you know of the performance.

Thank you!

EDIT: URLs to market share and Mr. Dot was removed due to this being my first post, but you'll survive

Its pretty much ok to ignore the Iphone 4 its performance it pretty terrible (IPhone 4 and lower are not even supported anymore by apple) aswell that phone came out over four years ago now (the Iphone 4s would also problem run Mr Dot at 30-50). it is also possible for a C2 game to run at 60 frames it just needs newer hardware. and you need to pay attention to your events and textures size. my games all run at or near 60. I used both ecjeta (ios) and crosswalk (android)

Hi nicmar,

Welcome to the forum, and "hej" from your neighbor Denmark

Unfutunatly, i dont have much experience with IOS releases, but we have released a game for Android with CocoonJS (heavy physics) that run "okay" on new phones.

However, there is certainly a lot of problems with CocoonJS, so i would advice trying one of the other options.

• sorry i couldnt give you a better answer! someone else might!

Games should easily run at 60 FPS on any fairly new device. The iPhone 4 has really weak hardware by today's standards - it was released in 2010, and is now so old you can buy unlocked $99 phones that outperform it by double. iOS 8 makes such a huge improvement to HTML5 game performance that I would recommend targeting iOS 8+ only, which also guarantees that the device has decent enough hardware to run games well (as the blog post describes, the 2011 iPhone 4S and iPad 2 devices can hit near enough 60 FPS on most of our benchmarks).

So publish with PhoneGap/cordova to iOS 8+ and everything should be fine.

Ashley that is definitely our plan to just move forward with iOS8+ devices and I see some great new plugins coming out to support phonegap but when i read your initial iOS8 report with HTML5, I gathered that PhoneGap still has issues:

"PhoneGap cannot yet take full advantage of the new performance improvements, but this is likely to be fixed in a future update." from your blog post.

What are the known problems with phonegap with C2? What should we watch out for. are there specific things that don't work, is it just that we're not getting 100% performance so everything works perfectly except framerates?

Thanks!

Caleb

part12studios - the blog post says it all. It's just Safari is faster because it can JIT-compile. PhoneGap is no slower than the other wrappers CocoonJS and Ejecta so there's no performance reason to avoid PhoneGap. And when some bug fixes/updates come in (so PhoneGap can use WKWebView), it will match Safari, and outperform the other wrappers by a long way. That's all it means.

nicmar

It is possible to get games running at 60fps on iPhone4, but it requires going old school in game development. High/low priority objects. Update times. Make sure to take advantage of few Sprite objects and use the Frames/Animations of Sprite objects rather than more distinct sprite objects.

Don't overload with trig every tick. if you know your angle is changing by x per tick then do that.

So unless your ready to be 32 LEAN AND MEAN your better off not targeting any weaker device. because it's really easy to make bad performant games in C2. I've seen even weaker than iPhone4 android games that run smooth. but it's all about being crafty.

Otherwise stick with IOS8+

Ashley ok i see, so like ye olden Windows Phone 8 would rely on IE10 (i mean WP 8.1 is the same, just with IE11 and webgl support) , so is the same with iOS and Safari? That makes a lot of sense.

That said, does this mean that things like iframe and other services that rely heavily on a browser will work? I ask because services like Ejecta actually crashed when the iFrame plugin was included and Clay.IO as well..

I'm hoping yes because those are useful things to have when making a web game and ideally it would be great to think that finally there is a wrapper that offers full web function support. =D

part12studios - yes, that's a big part of the benefit - PhoneGap uses a real browser engine so all that browsery stuff like iframes will work.

Awesome replies, thanks. I've just read up on all the performance docs and tuts on the site, and I'm thinking of going for the hope that iOS 8 will dominate in a couple of months, so I can spend more time on making an interesting game.

However, I didn't see anyone mention any games in the app store that's high speed and lots of action going on. I couldn't find a showcase of all Construct 2 games in the App store vs Android Market. I think that could be an incentive to get more people to actually buy a license, if they're thinking like me, that it might not work.

I really want to make a native app, so I really really hope Phonegap fixes the WKWebView thing soon. Anyone know how the progress is going?

PS: Hej xanxion

Anyone know how the progress is going?

Twitter conversation on the subject.

Ashley thanks for validating that. I did notice something.. i tested my video playback test web game http://part12studios.com/temp/Video_Test7/ on Safari with iOS8 and it seems video is still jacked up and not behaving as you'd expect.. do you know if this is just how things are going to be with iOS8 safari or something that might be addressable by C2?

nicmar try my game "bee active". it's done with ejecta for iOS.. it's also on a ton of other platforms and 100% free https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bee-act ... 49350?mt=8 and if you want to try the web version here http://part12studios.com/games/BeeActive/ to see what i'm talking about

while it might not look like much is going on.. there is a ton of parallax and a lot of things going on and if you die and let the game just go.. it will get hella fast..

bees, pollution, sun, clouds, mountains, rain, flowers, forest, about 20 blades of individual grass cycling.. everything moving at different speeds..

I'm pretty sure you can throw plenty of stuff around without trouble. as it stands phonegap sounds like it might not deliver top performance right now, but it also sounds like the bugs that exist are on the iOS side so theoretically the performance should improve as people update their phones.

However, if you're really pushing a lot of stuff around and it's absolutely necessary for your game to be fun, you might also just have to look into doing optimization (all engines require this, don't think this is unique to construct 2) like pooling assets to avoid a lot of create/destroy actions. Also keep in mind that this game is only doing pooling for grass.. rain and everything else uses "expensive" create /destroy events.

mobile requires planning and ever-conscious effort to be smart about how you do think regardless of the tech you use.

iPhone 4S is the absolute minimum IMO.

Star Nomad is a RPG/RTS with huge fleet battles, users have reported it running great on iPad 3 onwards, including iPad Mini 1st gen.

https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZS ... 41751&mt=8

It can only get better with iOS8 + Phonegap.

nicmar iOS 8.1 beta was recently released and last I read, Ashley asked the Apple guy in charge about it, and he said they've integrated the solution. So I hope it gets to iOS 8.1 release I really do.

Awesome thanks for all your comments. I will definitely check out your games. I noticed in the latest construct you can require ios8 which will close out some users but make sure performance will be good.

I'll get back once ive tested the games:)