Animation when window doesn't have the focus

[Akis]

Hi!

 

What's the best practices about animations when the user doesn't have the focus inside the window?

I know the window doesn't run at 60fps when it doesn't have the focus and this can create some weird behaviors. I tried 2 differents ways to animate elements and both have the same issue. The 2 ways are jQuery animate and GreenSock.

 

I noticed that when the window doesn't have the focus, some of my animations are not triggered. (Dom animation for jquery and canvas animation for GreenSock. I didn't try dom anim with greensock). Did you noticed the same thing? How to fix it?

I don't really understand that because even if the framerate is lower, you still have a frame, so an elapsed time, so the animation should still be there (at least the last state of the animation)...

 

Thanks.

[justinmc]

Can you give an example of an animation not being triggered?

 

There are some interesting issues that can come up with this, I'm specifically thinking of using requestAnimationFrame in a game loop.  I'm not familiar with how jQuery.animate behaves when the tab isn't active, but that could be interesting to dig into also.

[Quetzacotl]

requestAnimationFrame doesn't run without focus. If you want your animation to work even without focus then you have to use setTimeout/Interval.