Astonished by Crosswalk performances

[dTb]

Hi everybody !

 

I am searching a native performance wrapper for canvas based games on Android since long time.

 

For the time being I only knew 3 ways (solutions allowing to use an existing code without having to change anything):

CocoonJs, Ejecta-X et Intel XDK. The better being CocoonJs.

 

But because I don't like:

- Being dependent of a platform: the day they change the version, if this version introduce some bugs in your games, you cannot re-build anything until they fixed it.

- Being unable to create custom native plugins.

- Being unable to remove the splash screen.

 

Last week, as I was searching for nth time an alternative, I fell on Crosswalk (https://crosswalk-project.org/). I think I already found this long time ago but I was not really impressed by the project, was afraid by the installation steps and was not too much into Android.

 

But let's come to the point: as far as I have been able to test, performances are awesome!

 

I tested only one game so far (a canvas 2d only) and here is how it's performing:

+ Galaxy S2: same speed as CocoonJs with a faster boot.

+ According to a friend who tested for me on a "Nexus 7 KitKat", an "Xperia 4.0.4" and a "Galaxy S3 4.1.2" : faster than the CocoonJs version

- Sound effects seems to be very low on my S2, I forgot to ask to my friend for his devices

 

That's it... would be awesome if somebody else could try to confirm or refute my conclusions.

Installation is still a little pain in the a**. The biggest problem I got was to get the "adb" command line to work, but that's not really related to crosswalk, just an Android SDK stuff.

 

But if you are like me an "Ejecta on iOS and CocoonJs on Android" guy, I think it's worth to try!

[dTb]

Hi!

 

Finally after a few tests, crosswalk is not performing better than CocoonJS: in fact, my friend who did the tests made a mistake between the 2 versions: even if on my Galaxy S2 performances are the same, on his much newer devices ("Nexus 7 KitKat", "Xperia 4.0.4" and "Galaxy S3 4.1.2") CocoonJS is still much smoother and fluid.

[Gio]

That isn't really surprising, but the problem is that Cocoon.js doesn't meet your requirements as stated above, namely "use an existing code without having to change anything". Cocoon.js only supports a subset of the HTML5 spec - if your game is reasonably simple (in terms of which parts of HTML5 it uses), AND you're a bit lucky, then you won't have to change any code. But that isn't always the case.

 

Crosswalk is just a wrapper (it's more or less a full screen Chrome window), so it supports a lot more of the HTML5 functionality and (understandably) it's slower. But for a wrapper, it's still pretty damn fast.

 

It certainly depends on the game type, but I very rarely find that the performance of my Crosswalk projects is unacceptable, it's just fine most of the time, so I never bother with Cocoon.js.

 

I totally agree with you in that installing Crosswalk is a pain. But to be fair, once you've done it once, creating .apk's with it is really straightforward.

[valueerror]

insalling crosswalk was as easy as installing the chrome webbrowser..  at least on kubuntu linux .. i installed intel xdk with a few mouseclicks, ran it, imported my game and exported via crosswalk.. really nice..

 

and yes.. cocoonjs is faster in canvas mode but crosswalk is almost as fast as cocoonjs when running with webgl - and of course none of the cocoonjs hacks are needed...

[BdR]

A good performing JS-to-native-wrapper is the holy grail at the moment I think. A few months back, a forum member mentioned that he was working on something similar called gles.js, but unfortunately he hasn't posted since.

 

See his forum post and website here:

http://www.html5gamedevs.com/topic/7501-wip-glesjs-opengl-es-bindings-for-js-aka-fast-webgl-for-android/

http://tmtg.net/glesjs/