Ejecta or PhoneGap?

I thought Scirra was working to improve the Ejecta plugin, but now it seems they are throwing their support behind PhoneGap with the latest Beta build. Which is better for iOS? Can anyone explain the differences between them?

I thoguht the blog explaining IOS would be enough.

IOS8 WebKit that all browsers(except when running safari) are now able to access Nitro(accelerated javascript runtime compiler) and WebGL(full GPU acceleration). This means that PhoneGap will get access to it's weakest performance areas. The JS runtime and the GPU which Phonegap could not use. However this only counts as IOS8+

IOS7 does not allow PhoneGap or other browsers including WebApps to access Nitro or WebGL. So when running a game not in Safari will suffer large performance loss. So people made Ejecta. Which has a good JS runtime and a good graphics rendering.

If you want to support IOS7 and lower. You need to sue Ejecta/CacoonJS. If you are willing to support only IOS8+ then PhoneGap is probably going to be the better choice int he long run. Also and this is my favorite news. PhoneGap allows Cordova plugins. And... drool. Someone is making a PhoneGap WebRTC plugin. Where as no one is doing that with Ejecta. So when the that plugin is done.

PhoneGap =

WebGL

Nitro

WebRTC

Full memory management.

That is great to know. I was thinking about that myself.

jayderyu

What about the audio ? Does it support multiple audio played at once ? Previously I think PhoneGap can only play one audio at a time.

The great thing about PhoneGap and the Apache group that has made Cordova. Is that talented programmers can build interfaces from native to the JS level. While PhoneGap probably doesn't have a built in solution. this doesn't stop us from making or better yet finding solutions.

https://github.com/triceam/LowLatencyAudio

http://www.tricedesigns.com/2012/01/25/ ... -phonegap/

jayderyu

Thank you for the reply and the information about PhoneGap. I didn't know about the blog post. I'll read further into it.

Since 89% of iOS users (according to Apple) are using the most current version, PhoneGap might be the way to go when iOS 8 is released. Providing everyone chooses to upgrade. If I remember correctly, iOS 8 will run on an iPad2 and iPhone 4s.

Sebastion. yeah. IOS has amazing upgrade ratio compared to most other OSs.

There is a tutorial for getting low latency polyphoncs to work in C2. However if PhoneGap ends up being the main way to go. Then I wouldn't be surpised that Ashley could implemented a proper integration.

I know this is old, but I just stumbled across it.

I did a performance test between iOS8's WKWebView and Ejecta. We have a pretty complex scene. I really don't think the WKWebView is going to be THAT much better. It is great for simple pages, but for games it still doesn't cut it.

With a large scene we were getting 50fps for ejecta and crawling around 10fps for WKWebView.

I don't know if someone created hooks to make phonegap + wkwebviews + canvas better, but its doubtful.

I know this is old, but I just stumbled across it.

I did a performance test between iOS8's WKWebView and Ejecta. We have a pretty complex scene. I really don't think the WKWebView is going to be THAT much better. It is great for simple pages, but for games it still doesn't cut it.

With a large scene we were getting 50fps for ejecta and crawling around 10fps for WKWebView.

I don't know if someone created hooks to make phonegap + wkwebviews + canvas better, but its doubtful.

How did you managed to try this test out, and on which device?

parrissays - I'm not sure you did your test right, WKWebView can JIT-compile Javascript and Ejecta cannot, so it should be possible for WKWebView to outperform Ejecta by 3-4x.

BTW this blog post is relevant to the OP: https://www.scirra.com/blog/150/html5-game-performance-on-ios-8

We have already deprecated CocoonJS and will likely deprecate Ejecta in future too, so go for PhoneGap.

Hmmm, I'm still doubtful. I stumbled across this while trying to find performance information on Ejecta. Note: I'm not using Construct 2 or any Scirra products. I ended up manually creating my own test.

We created a WKWebView with an HTML page, an optimized RequireJS bundle, threejs and a couple other resources. We were getting 18 fps in a scene with 2000 threejs plane geometries and 9 materials with textures.

We create an identical Ejecta scene but with an index.js instead of an html page, and we got 50fps. Also note we are merging geometries and have interactions with them, etc.

JIT compiling of JS is great and would likely make Ejecta faster; however, I don't know that JIT compilation is the only performance metric. It is likely that the browser has lots of overhead and memory consumption. It is also likely that WebGL is slower than OpenGL ES on mobile devices. This is also exemplified by just running any threejs demo in your browser (try buffergeometry, which should the highest performing, and runs at 7fps on an iOS8 ipod touch).

It could be the case we are doing something wrong. I'll retest eventually and get back to you.

Devices tested: iPod Touch, iPad Mini, iPad Mini with Retina