8 replies to this topic

[AliBean]

Hello all, been a long while since I posted on these forums. A friend of mine has GM html5 and I was playing around with it the other day, I noticed however that it does not render well on my playbook at all, games load but they freeze straight away. Is this a GM problem or a playbook issue? I know that the playbook is supposed to natively support html5. I would really like to purchase a copy of GM html5 but this is a bit of a sticking point for me at the moment. Also, does anyone know if android apps made in GM Studio will play on the playbook?

Thanks in advance.

[NakedPaulToast]

I haven't had any luck sideloading GameMaker Apps onto the PlayBook.

The process is to convert an Android APK into the Playbook's BAR format, at this point the BAR file should be able to be sideloaded into the Playbooks Android Player. A few weeks ago I attempted to convert The YYGs Android runner to a BAR file, without success. RIM has since released an update so I'll try again.

Mike tweeted that when they were at GDS a few weeks ago they received two development Playbooks from RIM. And were considering a port. Personally I would love to see such a PlayBook Port. At $200 the Playbook is by far the best value for any tablet, the only problem is it's lack of Apps.

Inexpensive tablet + High quality hardware + App demand = Ideal development platform

[daz]

Hi, in February RIM had an event in which they were giving these out to any developer who released an application, so I participated and got my free device. This problem is 100% RIM's fault. When they released their Playbook OS 2, my simple Tic Tac Toe game went from 30 fps to < 1 fps. You can look on their forums that it's not an extremely common problem; I forget the exact cause but some event GM checks became massively slower in OS 2 killing the performance of the game as a whole.

As it stands, it seems they are aware of the issue, but I myself have not filed a bug report to them about this issue. Your best bet is to wait until the next Playbook update and hope they have fixed this bug.

Now, as far as Android apps made with GM running under the Playbook, no this will not work. As of last month at least, the Playbook does not support the JNI which all apps made with Studio utilize. You can install them on the Playbook, but they will crash on start up.

[AliBean]

Thanks for the speedy answers guys. I did do some research and figured it was due to the OS2 update so thanks for confirming. I completely agree with you NakedPaulToast, this would be an ideal platform if we could get something running, it would benefit the Playbook community greatly as the current state of the appworld even after the release of the android player is shocking.

[NakedPaulToast]

For what it's worth, OS 2.0.1.358 was released yesterday. GM:HTML5 performance still poor.

I have a benchmark where I create heavy duty objects, I keep creating them until the FPS drops below 30.

On my Playbook I get l less than 10 objects. For comparative purposes I get 268 on my iPad and less than 20 on my Galaxy Tab 10.1 using both Opera and Firefox mobile.

So it's not so much that just the Playbooks HTML5/JS sucks performance wise, but every mobile browser's HTML5/JS performance sucks, excepts the iOSs. But if you recall, So did iOS prior to the 5.0 upgrade at which point Apple devoted considerable effort to their HTML5/JS performance.

[Gamer_Dude64]

I have tweeted mike on twitter before and he said that they will be making the blackberry playbook as an export option sometime in the future. If you want to look at mikes tweets his username is @mdf200 and mine is @Gamer_Dude64

Edit: also, does anyone elses playbooks here take forever to start up like mine?

Edited by Gamer_Dude64, 15 May 2012 - 02:02 AM.

[AliBean]

Edit: also, does anyone elses playbooks here take forever to start up like mine?

Yeah, they all do that, it's a general blackberry trait. My BB phone also does that. I would really like to see a Blackberry export available. I read that RIM is offering some hansom rewards for good apps, $10 000 if certain criteria are met, if I am not mistaken.

[daz]

Yeah, they all do that, it's a general blackberry trait. My BB phone also does that. I would really like to see a Blackberry export available. I read that RIM is offering some hansom rewards for good apps, $10 000 if certain criteria are met, if I am not mistaken.

If you make an app for BB10 (what their new phone will run) that makes at least $1,000 in a year but less than $10,000, they will give you a check for the difference so the total is $10,000.

Anyway, really looking forward to an export option for it. I've been writing a commercial game for the Playbook but it's just a much slower process than using a tool like GM. Playbook supports compiling C/C++ and has OpenGL, so it's totally within YYGs reach. Never a really simple process though, lots of effort going into documenting + adding in the unique sensor code aside from doing the actual code for compiling & launching on the sim/device. I don't think it'd take more than 2 weeks for one developer to put in studio, but considering the small development team and the fact that studio is not even released, much less all bugs fixed on other platforms, it's not something I'm expecting at launch . Hopefully within the next year though.

[Gamer_Dude64]

I have also been looking into making some games with gmhtml5 and using their html5 webworks system for making apps but i have kind of lost the desire so i'm looking into the android platform.