Sabbatical Over

Aww, my 8-week sabbatical is now over. I wish I had more time, but I feel I used it well and there are certainly lots of Firefox bugs I want to work on too, so perhaps it’s about that time now (also, it’s not that long till Christmas anyway!)

So, what did I do on my sabbatical?

As I mentioned in the previous post, I took the time off primarily to work on a game, and that’s pretty much what I did. Except, I ended up working on two games. After realising the scope for our first game was much larger than we’d reckoned for, we decided to work on a smaller puzzle game too. I had a prototype working in a day, then that same prototype rewritten because DOM is slow in another day, then it rewritten again in another day because it ends up, canvas isn’t particularly fast either. After that, it’s been polish and refinement; it still isn’t done, but it’s fun to play and there’s promise. We’re not sure what the long-term plan is for this, but I’d like to package it with a runtime and distribute it on the major mobile app-stores (it runs in every modern browser, IE included).

The first project ended up being a first-person, rogue-like, dungeon crawler. None of those genres are known for being particularly brief or trivial games, so I’m not sure what we expected, but yes, it’s a lot of work. In this time, we’ve gotten our idea of the game a bit more solid, designed some interaction, worked on various bits of art (texture-sets, rough monsters) and have an engine that lets you walk around an area, pick things up and features deferred, per-pixel lighting. It doesn’t run very well on your average phone at the moment, and it has layout bugs in WebKit/Blink based browsers. IE11’s WebGL also isn’t complete enough to render it as it is, though I expect I could get a basic version of it working there. I’ve put this on the back-burner slightly to focus on smaller projects that can be demoed and completed in a reasonable time-frame, but I hope to have the time to return to it intermittently and gradually bring it up to the point where it’s recognisable as a game.

You can read a short paragraph and see a screenshot of both of these games at our team website, or see a few more on our Twitter feed.

What did I learn on my sabbatical?

Well, despite what many people are pretty eager to say, the web really isn’t ready as a games platform. Or an app platform, in my humble opinion. You can get around the issues if you have a decent knowledge of how rendering engines are implemented and a reasonable grasp of debugging and profiling tools, but there are too many performance and layout bugs for it to be comfortable right now, considering the alternatives. While it isn’t ready, I can say that it’s going to be amazing when it is. You really can write an app that, with relatively little effort, will run everywhere. Between CSS media queries, viewport units and flexbox, you can finally, easily write a responsive layout that can be markedly different for desktop, tablet and phone, and CSS transitions and a little JavaScript give you great expressive power for UI animations. WebGL is good enough for writing most mobile games you see, if you can avoid jank caused by garbage collection and reflow. Technologies like CocoonJS makes this really easy to deploy too.

Given how positive that all sounds, why isn’t it ready? These are the top bugs I encountered while working on some games (from a mobile specific viewpoint):

WebGL cannot be relied upon

WebGL has finally hit Chrome for Android release version, and has been enabled in Firefox and Opera for Android for ages now. The aforementioned CocoonJS lets you use it on iOS too, even. Availability isn’t the problem. The problem is that it frequently crashes the browser, or you frequently lose context, for no good reason. Changing the orientation of your phone, or resizing the browser on desktop has often caused the browser to crash in my testing. I’ve had lost contexts when my app is the only page running, no DOM manipulation is happening, no textures are being created or destroyed and the phone isn’t visibly busy with anything else. You can handle it, but having to recreate everything when this happens is not a great user experience. This happens frequently enough to be noticeable, and annoying. This seems to vary a lot per phone, but is not something I’ve experienced with native development at this scale.

An aside, Chrome also has an odd bug that causes a security exception if you load an image (on the same domain), render it scaled into a canvas, then try to upload that canvas. This, unfortunately, means we can’t use WebGL on Chrome in our puzzle game.

Canvas performance isn’t great

Canvas ought to be enough for simple 2d games, and there are certainly lots of compelling demos about, but I find it’s near impossible to get 60fps, full-screen, full-resolution performance out of even quite simple cases, across browsers. Chrome has great canvas acceleration and Firefox has an accelerated canvas too (possibly Aurora+ only at the moment), and it does work, but not well enough that you can rely on it. My puzzle game uses canvas as a fallback renderer on mobile, when WebGL isn’t an option, but it has markedly worse performance.

Porting to Chrome is a pain

A bit controversial, and perhaps a pot/kettle situation coming from a Firefox developer, but it seems that if Chrome isn’t your primary target, you’re going to have fun porting to it later. I don’t want to get into specifics, but I’ve found that Chrome often lays out differently (and incorrectly, according to specification) when compared to Firefox and IE10+, especially when flexbox becomes involved. Its transform implementation is also quite buggy too, and often ignores set perspective. There’s also the small annoyance that some features that are unprefixed in other browsers are still prefixed in Chrome (animations, 3d transforms). I actually found Chrome to be more of a pain than IE. In modern IE (10+), things tend to either work, or not work. I had fewer situations where something purported to work, but was buggy or incorrectly implemented.

Another aside, touch input in Chrome for Android has unacceptable latency and there doesn’t seem to be any way of working around it. No such issue in Firefox.

Appcache is awful

Uh, seriously. Who thought it was a good idea that appcache should work entirely independently of the browser cache? Because it isn’t a good idea. Took me a while to figure out that I have to change my server settings so that the browser won’t cache images/documents independently of appcache, breaking appcache updates. I tend to think that the most obvious and useful way for something to work should be how it works by default, and this is really not the case here.

Aside, Firefox has a bug that means that any two pages that have the same appcache manifest will cause a browser crash when accessing the second page. This includes an installed version of an online page using the same manifest.

CSS transitions/animations leak implementation details

This is the most annoying one, and I’ll make sure to file bugs about this in Firefox at least. Because setting of style properties gets coalesced, animations often don’t run. Removing display:none from an element and setting a style class to run a transition on it won’t work unless you force a reflow in-between. Similarly, switching to one style class, then back again won’t cause the animation on the first style-class to re-run. This is the case at least in Firefox and Chrome, I’ve not tested in IE. I can’t believe that this behaviour is explicitly specified, and it’s certainly extremely unintuitive. There are plenty of articles that talk about working around this, I’m kind of amazed that we haven’t fixed this yet. I’m equally concerned about the bad habits that this encourages too.

DOM rendering is slow

One of the big strengths of HTML5 as an app platform is how expressive HTML/CSS are and how you can easily create user interfaces in it, visually tweak and debugging them. You would naturally want to use this in any app or game that you were developing for the web primarily. Except, at least for games, if you use the DOM for your UI, you are going to spend an awful lot of time profiling, tweaking and making seemingly irrelevant changes to your CSS to try and improve rendering speed. This is no good at all, in my opinion, as this is the big advantage that the web has over native development. If you’re using WebGL only, you may as well just develop a native app and port it to wherever you want it, because using WebGL doesn’t make cross-device testing any easier and it certainly introduces a performance penalty. On the other hand, if you have a simple game, or a UI-heavy game, the web makes that much easier to work on. The one exception to this seems to be IE, which has absolutely stellar rendering performance. Well done IE.

This has been my experience with making web apps. Although those problems exist, when things come together, the result is quite beautiful. My puzzle game, though there are still browser-specific bugs to work around and performance issues to fix, works across varying size and specification of phone, in every major, modern browser. It even allows you to install it in Firefox as a dedicated app, or add it to your homescreen in iOS and Chrome beta. Being able to point someone to a URL to play a game, with no further requirement, and no limitation of distribution or questionable agreements to adheer to is a real game-changer. I love that the web fosters creativity and empowers the individual, despite the best efforts of various powers that be. We have work to do, but the future’s bright.