[unfortunate]

I keep filling my car with water, my car stops working, they should really fix cars.

If your code crashes every browser, your code is shit. Yes the browsers could do better, but you shouldn't write shit code that crashes them.

[AshleysBrain]

I see what you're getting at, but IMO this is probably one of the better coded HTML5 games out there. It's written to be fast, low memory overhead and conforming to ECMAScript 5 strict mode. It still doesn't work. I genuinely have no idea how I can improve the quality of the code in this.

[ehsanu1]

IMO this is probably one of the better coded HTML5 games out there

I genuinely have no idea how I can improve the quality of the code in this.

I won't jump to conclusions, but this attitude is kind of indicative of the Dunning-Kruger effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect) being at play, especially given that you seem to be blaming browser makers for your game crashing.

Even the very best programmers can think of ways to improve the quality of their code. In fact, they're more likely to find problems in their own code - that's part of why they're the best.

In any case, assuming you aren't suffering from the Dunning–Kruger effect, can you mention what attempts you've made to narrow down the problem?

Have you tried disabling parts of the game (like rendering for example) to see if the browser still crashes? That would be a simple, albeit tedious, way of narrowing down where the problem is. Come up with a minimal crash case.

If you find a legitimate problem across all 4 browsers, then you can use that minimal case to demonstrate the problem and file a bug report. Or, more likely, you'll figure out what's wrong in your code this way and fix it.

[unfortunate]

But, it doesn't work.

Your code can only be as good as the platform you're working with. You can't code features beyond what are supported, and if you're trying to do too much, you need to scale back. If you based a games design on the idea that every computer was quad core with a huge graphics card, it would be pretty amazing, but no-one except a select few could play it.

Short of it is, you're code doesn't work, whatever is wrong with it, it doesn't work. And you can't expect browsers to change to suit you, if you really don't know how to improve it, scrap it and start again but at the moment you can't blame the browsers for not being able to support your, probably brilliant, game.

[maushu]

Huh, why are your assets all on different files?

Have you tried to put them into sprite sheets?

[manuscreationis]

+1 to this response

I've recently been reading into making use of sprite sheets with Canvas apps, and the drawImage method makes using sprite sheets a breeze. You simply need to keep track of cellsize, number of cells, and your current cell.

[ehsanu1]

I suppose spritesheets would making loading time faster since there would be fewer files. But other than that, it's just a neat way of organizing sprites, which can also be managed with a good naming convention tying together related sprites. Is there any other reason to use a spritesheet?

Well, if you're using dom-based animation, spritesheets also work better for animations since it's much faster to adjust background-image-position in a div, compared to just replacing the background-image.

[manuscreationis]

Thats actually a different approach than how I had been doing it - i had been loading a hidden spritesheet by grabbing it from the dom (this is all just prototypal, playing around with canvas code, nothing "production" quality mind you), then keeping track of the position in memory and iterating through the frames using the overload of drawImage that lets you specify a slice of the image as what you want to draw.

I wasn't even aware of using background-image-position as a way to do this... I'll stick that one in my cap, thanks!

I'd say the main benefit of spritesheets as i've seen it would be what you've already commented on: Fewer GETs against the server (when you're thinking in terms of scale, for a large project with lots of assets, i'd say this becomes important, but of course that's a fairly subjective metric), as well as organization of files.

You could go with naming conventions... but then for a 45 frame animation, you have 45 distinct files all named something like "SPECIFIC_ANIMATION_FRAME_X", as opposed to using a dynamic approach, utilizing the cell-size of the frames and the width and height of the image overall, to calculate the frames on the fly; To me, that is far more maintainable than a huge pile of aptly named images.

You could make the claim that calculating out the frame each time is wasted cpu cycles that could be spent elsewhere, but I feel like it's the right approach.

But that could just be my opinion. I would love for someone to weigh in with actual metrics on whether or not using a dynamic approach is actually faster or slower in a meaningful way than a brute-force style naming convention animation system.

[ehsanu1]

Well, I doubt there would be much of a speed difference when using canvas/drawImage, since I assume "calculating the frame" involves just use some arithmetic on the dimensions of each frame - which is pretty trivial in terms of CPU use at 60fps.

Anyways, you're right, with lots of assets it probably is a much better way to organize sprites into spritesheet. I just never did anything on that scale. 45 animation frames? Sheesh, I'm happy if I can get 5 or 6. :)