Flash 9/AS3 scrolling engine, preview version

Hi all,

Could you please check this out? http://www.gamesquid.com/TileSQUID/Game.html (FP9 required) and tell me how well it runs? It's smooth on my computer, even if I open the swf 10 times simultaniously, but I'd like it to know how it runs on other pcs.

The map was made with Tiled and my engine now loads the xml (not in the zip yet because it's not stable atm).

Graphics were custom made by a pixel artist for a game I'm working on (which I plan to port to F9 now).

(Both the graphics and map are still work in progress versions btw).

Put an FPS counter on it.

K, just a sec...

Added the FPS counter. It's set to run at 120 fps now, on my computer I'm getting a steady 65 in Internet Explorer (even with multiple versions running simultaneously), and about 110-120 in the standalone player.

Note that I'm not cleaning up everything correctly yet, so if you keep it running for a very long time, or if you don't have a lot of memory, it might start to slow down (haven't tried yet, and I actually doubt it, but it's very well possible).
Edit : nevermind, just checked my task manager and memory useage stays at about 30mb when using the standalone player, and it doesn't increase, so that seems to be ok.

I suggest you set it to 30, and don't aritifically inflate it with setting it so high.

58-65 under firefox

I agree w/ UnknowGuy......I always see these demos/tests set to 120 fps, and it's kinda of annoying, since it is artificial, once you got everything else in there and it becomes a real game....so set it to a realistic 30 fps and we can give it a real run and tell you then......at this point I'm bouncing between a 61-64 in latest IE, on a 2.1 ghz amd laptop w/ 768 mb of ram, and a 128 mb v-card.....

but I'd like to test it when you have it 30 fps....

paul

PS: it's quite jerky too.....

Not sure why I'd want to test it on 30 fps - I'm pretty sure even very slow computers are able to run it at 30 fps, so that wouldn't really give me any information? Or am I missing something?
By setting it at the maximum, I can see how well other computers handle it. Could you tell me what downside it has?

Well, not sure about the jerkyness, I noticed that too but only on one computer (with a flat screen), not on the other one with a normal screen, so I thought it was an issue with the screen. It's probably the flash renderer. Either that, or the unstable fps due to it being set so high. I'll see what I can do.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by tonypa

...I also have not yet seen any significant speed increase in AVM2, the perfomance in drawing the graphics is same as before and while the code executions may be faster there are very few games running so much code that it slows down the game.

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Did you see that ???
Flash 9 required :)
Additional info :)
Tip: if you wait 10 secs or so and the dinosaur stops dancing you can control the view using your mouse.

When i first saw that, I was totally shocked. :)
The good news about this staff are:
- some portions of this engine will be opensource;
- in the next few weeks there will be another post of this engine with some Quake levels :P

That's pretty cool, I'll have to keep an eye on this 3d project.


As for the jerkyness in my engine, I just tried on a slower computer than mine, and saw it too, but I think I know what's causing it :

- cacheAsBitmap, which should make the scrolling faster, but it's also slowing down the engine when I'm adding/removing tiles, especially since removing tiles is split up over multiple frames. So I'll try disabling cacheAsBitmap until all my adding/removing operations are done, and then enable it again.
- I'm using a load of very small (24x24) tiles for this map, in seperate layers, using bitmapdata, and adding them to the map just takes some time. So I'm now experimenting with a way to cache supertiles as bitmapdata, so I don't have to generate them each time. This will be optional per layer, so you can still have a layer for animated tiles.

Hope this will make it smoother on slower computers. However, a 2.1 ghz laptop like Pentru has should be able to run it pretty well though, because I tested it on a similar machine without problems.

Ok, I made a version running at 30 fps. I tried removing all the jerkiness, and here's the result :

http://www.gamesquid.com/TileSQUID/30fps.html

It should run at about 24 fps in a browser.

To the right you'll see a list of numbers. These indicate how much miliseconds my update routine takes to calculate each frame, with the latest frame at the top. On my computer, this list is constantly showing 0, with an occasional higher but still accetable number.

Please let me know if these numbers are significantly higher on your computer, along with your specs. Would really appreciate it.

If the numbers are low, but ti's still jerky, then I'm afraid there isn't much I'll be able to do about it - the numbers indicate how long my code takes to execute, if it still lags somewhere, it's probably something with your computer as far as I can tell.

The memory useage has increased a bit (doubled actually) because I now cache some more things, but this is optional in the engine.

EDIT: btw, if anyone is interested in how the engine updates the screen, just go to http://www.gamesquid.com/TileSQUID/30fps.swf and maximize the browser window. If you don't get how a scrolling engine works, it might give you some insight.

EDIT2:I just opened the engine 12 times in different browser windows simultaneously, and the framerate didn't drop one bit, so I'm guessing that's pretty good. Now I really need some more feedback from you guys. I want this to run as fast as possible before moving on to adding new stuff.

Crap, why do I have to spend another $700 to buy flash again.

works smooth for me: 23-24 in FF
P4 2.8 1Gb RAM GeFORCE5200 + two monitors - my workstation :)
10-13% CPU use in the task management window.
The right column filled with 0 numbers ocassionally changed to 10 and then jumps down to 0.

Thanks for testing!
Whenever you see a higher number to the right, the engine is adding new tiles to/removing old tiles from the screen.

Since I split up my map in supertiles of about 192x192 pixels, and pre-cache those supertiles as bitmaps (hrough code off course), all that's happening in those frames is that a few Bitmaps are created, with cached bitmapdata attached to them. However, this happens on 3 layers, so that would explain why it's taking 10 milliseconds to do this.

One option to make it even faster is adding offsets to the automatically generated supertiles, so they don't all start on the same positions, and adding the supertiles gets distributed over multiple frames. Sounds like a plan.

Besides pre-caching the supertiles as bitmapdata, I'll also create an option to cache the supertiles in runtime, and always remove the oldest from the cache. For larger maps, this should be a lot more memory-efficient, but for small maps that use a lot of tiles (ie top down games with small tiles), pre-caching seems like the way to go.

I'd like to see some more people test this and tell me how well it performs on their systems.

same laptop as above testing......getting a steady 23-24 fps ......the jerkiness is almost non existent....I also get a constant "0" in the right column.

there is some occasional flickering though....and I get that in my bmp scroll engine as well....and I've seen that problem as well in others.....maybe screen frame rate versus flash rate....don't know ......

anyway, it's good :)

I'm not sure if this might sound dumb or something....but why would you bitmap cache what it's already a bitmap to begin with (gif/jpg...etc)...I thought one should bitmap-cache only when dealing with vector data......since a bitmap (jpg/gif) is already considered as such by flash.......or maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're doing...

paul.

I bitmap cache supertiles, so I don't have to generate them when they move on screen. A supertile can be made up of a lot of tiles (I'm using 8x8 regions, so 64 tiles), and this takes a while to generate. So by pre-generating these tiles and caching them as a bitmap, I just need to add the bitmap to the layer.
I also cache layers, using cacheAsBitmap, to improve the scrolling. This is what was probably causing the jerkyness, because I forgot to turn it off while adding/removing tiles, and it had to be regenerated a couple of times during these frames.

I get the flickering too on my flat screen, but not on normal screen. You're probably right in saying it has to do with screen/flash refresh rates. A vsync option would probably solve this, but alas, I don't think this is supported (it wasn't in previous version of flash, and I doubt it is now).

Thanks for checking!

Wow this is looking awsome, i got 24 solid in ff and 0's all the time...

I'm looking for someone who would want to help me on this. Basically, what I'd want is someone who could help me optimize as much as possible. I've done some big changes to how I cache supertiles (previously using bitmapdata, now I just unparent the movieclips, and use a Timer to empty the cache every 500ms) to make it more memory and cpu efficient, and some other things, and would like to make a release it soon, but I want to make sure it's as good as possible.

So any experienced developers (doesn't matter if you know as3 well, you'll learn), let me know if you want to help me out.

Off course, if you want to help me out on other aspects (new features etc), that's fine too.