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by SimianLogic2 4809 days ago
has anyone had success with an html5 game on ios? it seems viable for android (v8 yay!), but i haven't been satisfied at all with javascript performance on iOS. maybe for something that's turn-based and doesn't require slick transitions?

(edit: this sounds a little negative... what i mean is, pointing to a really slick html5 game on the app store would make selling the book a lot easier)
3 comments
kayoone 4809 days ago
Biolab Disaster (http://playbiolab.com/) has a great iOS port which has excellent performance on my iphone 4S. Its only a prototype though but people really seemed to like it. The engine they developed also has some clever appstore bundling tech which improves JS performance alot as it looks.
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bni 4809 days ago
Depends on how you define success. My game Orbium made reasonably well on iOS.

HTML5 game development on Android is a performance nighmare. Even if it was true that v8 was used in Android Browser or Android WebView (it isnt), it doesnt matter, it is the horrible draw performance that is the bottleneck (both canvas and css translate3d).

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olsn 4809 days ago
You are probably right! Good point, I should probably add that to the page.

There are some CocoonJS games in the store, you can see some here: http://ludei.com/games CocoonJS will give your HTML5 game native performane.

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dubcanada 4809 days ago
I think you need to rethink your terms.

Native performance is wrong, javascript (unless it's like asm.js or something) will never be "native performance".

All CocoonJS is, is just a OpenGL layer with html/css/javascript support. And while it is faster then just flat out using JSC. It is not faster then c/objective c + opengl.

There have also been several reports of CocoonJS actually being slower then UIWebView. A simple google search for "cocoonjs performance" returned several issues.

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olsn 4809 days ago
That is not entirely correct - UIWebView canvas rendering is far behind OpenGL layers like CocoonJS, Ejecta or directCanvas(AppMobi) in terms of performance - the difference however is, that those tools are able to ONLY render canvas-contents, so you are not really able to render any HTML5 forms, input ect... but that's not what canvas-games are about.
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dubcanada 4809 days ago
It still uses Javascript. Native OpenGL+ObjC/C (done correct) will always be faster. All it really is, is better performance then UIWebView as it doesn't have all the webcore/kit stuff.

ALl I'm getting at is saying "native performance" is not correct. In a world where even 2-3 FPS can mean a usable game or a not usable game. I think the terminology matters a lot.

But you should still recommend people to using those solutions, just don't pass them off as something they are not.

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olsn 4809 days ago
Okay, I agree with that - I'll change that :)
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