Questions about Particles and Bunnymark Performance

lemon07r

Edit!: I was using the wrong build for comparison. It was an earlier build hosted for testing long time ago. Here is the more accurate comparison with builds from both up to date gideros and defold engines.

Defold particlefx 22fps @ 15000
Defold go.animate() 23fps @ 10000
Gideros (particles) 23 fps @ 7500

Hello everyone. I've recently been messing around with LUA engines after learning to use love2d. Recently I did a comparison of the bunnymark benchmark between Gideros using particles and Defold using go.animate() then posted my results in the Defold forum.
Original Post:

I wanted an excuse to mess around with Gideros, so I tested a quick bunnymark benchmark on my android phone (LG V20). Also tested with britzl's version with Defold.

Results:
Removed, see edit.

*Fps was very erratic with the Gideros, jumping as high as 40 but didn’t seem to dip below 28.
**I’m not sure if this makes a difference but I exported to an Android Studio template from Gideros instead of to Android directly then compiled to an APK using android studio.

I was asked questions about the use of particles in the Gideros bunnymark test but I feel I don't know near enough about Gideros to answer these questions well. I've only used Gideros for a few days lightly, so maybe you guys can answer them better for me, I'm also curious too.

Are there any limitations to particles in Gideros? Can you attach things to them? Can you change the looks of individual particles? Scale and rotation? Change the “sprite”?

totebo

In Gideros you can change a number of properties of each particle, such as alpha, rotation, size, velocity and TTL. More details here:

http://docs.giderosmobile.com/reference/gideros/Particles#Particles

Apollo14

I looked at their posts on defold forum.
I wonder why people are so attached to "visual editors"? Probably because of marketing videos like this or that.
Marketing videos don't mention that setting layers, objects and their properties - it's all very trivial, maybe 3-5% of actual work, especially in mobile development for tiny screens.

The main work is backend scripting, it takes 95% of time, and it's unavoidable.
(this is how I see it, I'm new to gamedev so probably I'm wrong, I'd like to know other opinions)

Apollo14

offtopic: does somebody know if OOP is there in Defold?
I've seen russian videos of Defold's evangelist Oleg Pridyuk, he condemned OOP and told that many Unity developers tried Defold and disliked it because they are too attached to OOP, though it's inefficient perfomance-wise.
(I'm not sure how convenient it is without OOP, because in many apps perfomance is not a issue, but OOP could be actually helpful)

lemon07r

Apollo14 said:

I looked at their posts on defold forum.
I wonder why people are so attached to "visual editors"? Probably because of marketing videos like [I cant post links]
Marketing videos don't mention that setting layers, objects and their properties - it's all very trivial, maybe 3-5% of actual work, especially in mobile development for tiny screens.

The main work is backend scripting, it takes 95% of time, and it's unavoidable.
(this is how I see it, I'm new to gamedev so probably I'm wrong, I'd like to know other opinions)

I think that will vary depending on the type of game you want to make.

Personally I dont really care about having a visual editor, but Defold's is by far one of the best I've used.

The main reason I like Defold is it's top notch quality control and great documentation. Between all the engines Ive used, Ive ran into the least unexpected issues using Defold so far (keep in mind Im still experimenting with a bunch and am still relatively new to all of them).

I dont think it's "perfect" but its given me much less hassle than other engines. Everything just works (atleast so far for me). It took me hours to get a working apk and html5 export for Gideros. Defold bundled and exported everything quickly and properly in my first attempts. So far to me it "seems" to have the most bases covered, where other engines have had a lot more issues. I'll have to accumulate more experience with different engines before I can speak more confidently on the topic.

As for scripting, it uses a message system and a modular design unique to the engine, which is still taking some time for me to learn so I cant really speak on that. It's kind of cool because it lets scripts attached to different objects interact with other objects or scripts using the message system.

keszegh

"scripts attached to objects" - sounds like inspired by flash/actionscript.

lemon07r

keszegh said:

"scripts attached to objects" - sounds like inspired by flash/actionscript.

There is a guide for flash users actually in the manuals section of the defold website called "Defold for flash users" which starts off "This guide presents Defold as an alternative for Flash game developers. It covers some of the key concepts used in Flash game development, and explains the corresponding tools and methods in Defold." So it looks like there are some flash similarities in Defold.

rrraptor

keszegh said:

"scripts attached to objects" - sounds like inspired by flash/actionscript.

Godot (and Unity, and maybe some other engines) also have this feature

antix

Personally I prefer Gideros where you have complete control over an objects behavior

lemon07r

Hey I wanted to update some things for accuracy!

I had been using either older code or code built with a much older version of defold so the numbers I was getting were not an accurate respresentation for defold.

Here are my results from html5 builds across various frameworks/engines on my phone (LG V20 using chrome).

Defold particlefx 22fps @ 15000
Defold go.animate() 23fps @ 10000
Phaser 22 fps @ 3100
Gideros (particles) 23 fps @ 7500
Pixi.js (4.7.3) 23fps @ 10500
Openfl 8.0.0 22fps @ 39000
Kha 21fps @ 50000

I kept testing consistent as possible, and restested multiple times to validate the numbers. I made sure to use the most up to date everything with the exception of phaser, Im unsure of what version it is.

I cant share links, but I have all the sources and links to the hosted builds if any of you want to test yourself or see how the bunnies were rendered.

Apollo14

Phaser 22 fps @ 3100

I thought Phaser will dominate all the other engines in html5

lemon07r

Apollo14 said:

I thought Phaser will dominate all the other engines in html5

I was surprised by this too. Ill visit the phaser forums tomorrow and see what they say. Could possibly just be an older version or suboptimal code.

Apollo14

You tested only html5?
Can you test apks?

lemon07r

Apollo14 said:

You tested only html5?
Can you test apks?

I had some issues compiling to APK for some of the tests. Ill try later tonight.

lemon07r

Defold particlefx 31fps @ 15000
Defold go.animate() 31fps @ 12000
Gideros (particles) 31 fps @ 15000

Tested natively on android, LG V20.