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[Sam]

Hello!

This isn't quite the standard feedback request, so I hope you'll bear with me.

I've done some work on fancy normal mapped lighting effects in Flash, and would like to know how well it works on some computers other than my own. To test I've put it into something that looks kind of like a game, but isn't really. You can move the player around (WASD or arrow keys), shoot (mouse), and spawn some things that chase the player (spacebar).  

Update-o-rama:
Thanks to a wonderfully large response, I've now got a pretty good impression of how it runs on a variety of machines.  Basically: two cores good, four cores amazing, one core not so much.

I am now mainly interested in:

Low spec machines
I've added an option to the game (right-click whilst you're playing) to disable the realtime light effects.  In theory this will make it at least playable on more humble machines.  I'd love to know if that's the case!  When you activate this mode, the game may pause a moment whilst it renders the static lighting for the whole level.

Crashes
Crashes have been happening right at the start of running the test on a few machines.  I'm very interested in narrowing down what situation these happen in.  If you do suffer a crash (sorry!) then the more information you can give the better!  Particularly: Operating System, Browser (version number if possible), Flash Plugin (this page can tell you your version).  If you're able to catch where the loading bar is up to at the time of the crash that would also be extremely useful.

SPECIAL BONUS OFFER
If you've suffered crashes, could you now try an extra test designed to identify their cause?  Visit this page and just click the thing to let it run.  It will be expected to cause another crash for you, but hopefully will let you see what causes it and so help me avoid them in the future.  Again, thank you very much.


Note! There have been a couple of browser crashes.  Save that novel you're writing in Google Docs before you test.

Click

Thank you very much.

[joesiv]

Crashed my firefox.

firefox 3.5.9
flash 10.0.22.87
Win XP

[Inanimate]

That is really cool! I love how destructible the environment is, and that lightning is really neat. It was a bit annoying how easy it was to get 'caught' on the sides of the tunnels I created, however; perhaps ease up on the collision detection, or make the explosions larger?

55.6 FPS Average, Firefox 3.0.

[Falmil]

About 33FPS average. Using a PC with a 2.1 GHz dual core CPU, Windows XP and 2GB of RAM.

[mjau]

Ran at about 7-8 fps average here, 10 max.  Linux 64-bit Firefox 3.6.2, Athlon64 2.2ghz dual-core.  Also tried windows flash via wine since linux flash has terrible performance at the best of times, but that just crashed.

[Draknek]

That looks awesome!

Got about 30FPS, then a bit less when I spawned loads of enemies to follow me.

Dual core Intel 2.0GHz processors, Ubuntu 9.04 (32bit), Firefox 3.0

[John Nesky]

Awesome!

At the beginning it's 50 fps. When I am flying and shooting it drops to mid-to-low 40's. When I spawn a bunch of enemies it quickly drops to around 20 or below.

Dual Core Intel 2 GHz
Mac OS X 10.5.8
Safari 4.0.5

[Ivan]

~40 fps average, Chrome on 2.5Ghz Macbook Pro.

[Craig Stern]

Wow, this is really impressive. You programmed this in Flash?

I averaged 55 fps when not doing much, then dropped it to about 52 once I started moving around and blasting things, and 44 fps when I spawned enemies and started shooting myself tunnels and traveling through them. I managed to get the framerate as low as 30 fps by moving around in circles and shooting wildly in all directions.

4 GB RAM
2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Windows Vista x64

[deathtotheweird]

58 average on intel q6600 (i think 2.4ghz) and win7, latest firefox

when I spawn enemies it drops around 40 average

edit: debug flash 10 as well

[Kunal]

Awesome stuff!

I got an average of 57fps, regardless of whether I was shooting, or if enemies had been spawned.

Specs : Core 2 Duo P8600 running at 2.4Ghz,  6GB RAM, Windows 7 64-bit, Flash player 10,0,45,2 running in opera 10.51

[Oddball]

I got a pretty steady 50fps. Shooting and flying didn't slow it down at all. Adding enemies started to drop the frame rate, but it took a fair few.

3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, OS X 10.6.2, Safari 4.0.5

I like the lighting effects and deformable terrain is always a good move in my book. 

[John Nesky]

Oh yeah, we should point out whether we were using the debug version of the Flash player. I was: Debug Flash 10.

[Guillaume]

Config:

Core2Duo @3.16 Ghz, 2GB RAM, ATI Radeon 4850.

Testing on the latest google chrome+flash plugin.

No ennemies: 60 fps
40 ennemies: 40 fps
60 ennemies: 35 fps

[Sam]

Wow fantastic, thank you for so many responses already!

joesiv, I'm very sorry for the crash
Did that happen as soon as you clicked to start, before any graphics were rendered?  If so that's likely due to the wildly inefficient way the rock texture is being generated, which tends to make the Flash plugin - and some browsers - unresponsive whilst it happens.  I'll try to fix that up.

Inanimate, I agree with you on the player-wall collisions not feeling good.  I'd like the result of hitting a wall to be to slide along it rather than the current juddering to a halt.  That'll need some smarter handling than what's going on right now.

It's interesting that performance is dropping so much as more enemies are spawned.  They're designed to be pretty lightweight in their performance demands so I haven't given them much attention when optimising, but looks like I was wrong.  Hopefully the drop is coming from rendering their glowing triangle shapes, in which case I can just pre-render them.

Overall I'm pleased with the reported framerates so far.  I was worried that only the most powerful CPUs would handle it, but it looks like knocking the target FPS to 30 should make it workable on a pretty decent range of machines.  Also glad that Mac OS doesn't seem to be slowing it down as I had read that the Mac version of the Flash player had a much slower implementation of custom shaders.  Performance on Linux is a shame, but I was half expecting it to just not work.

You programmed this in Flash?

This is indeed in Flash, but with quite a lot of help from custom shaders made in Adobe Pixel Bender. I've made another demo of the lighting effect on it's own. That example uses a handful of photographs to generate the normal map, and the code for the shader is included in the comments section.  I've also attempted to make an introduction tutorial to using Pixel Bender with flash.  Would be interesting to see if the photograph demo causes crashes in the same cases as this game demo (if you dare!)


Again thank you all very much!  Really very useful information.

[Captain_404]

45 fps

Chrome 4.1.249.1045
flash 10,0,45,2
windows xp pro
intel core2 cpu
2 GHz
1.99 GB of RAM

This is absolutely incredible. I've been out of the tech-driven flash scene for a while now (well, actually pretty much the entire scene...), but wow, I can't say I've seen people do things like this in flash ever. I seem to remember most of the focus being on 3D graphics...

[Eraser]

3.06ghz single core
2gb ram
Vista
firefox 3.6.somethingIdontCareAbout
flash: 10,0,45,2
geforce 7600
avg fps: 15

I spawned 10-15 enemies, and that brought the FPS down to 10-12. FPS was constant whether shooting or not, as others have experienced.

[Xecutor]

mac mini 1.6Ghz intel core duo
latest safari
45fps!!!!
I'm impressed.
But adding enemies lowers fps very quickly.
With 10 enemies fps is 25.

[st33d]

Crashed my firefox.

firefox 3.5.9
flash 10.0.22.87
Win XP

Same here. I click on the Flash and then BAM - no Firefox.

[st33d]

Crashed the plugin in Chrome too. But on Internet Explorer it works fine.

Something to bear in mind:

If you're developing with Flex or the Flash IDE, it will default to using the Internet Explorer plugin - so evidently this crashing issue would be hard to track as it seems to be plugin specific.