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Flash vs HTML - Waste Invaders

flashvhtml.com

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Re: Flash vs HTML - Waste Invaders

#21

Post by edoloughlin »

goggles99 wrote: post #18

Game ran like complete garbage in HTML5 (Firefox 19, Windows7 i7 2600, 12GB ram). It had a very low framerate, did not respond to mouse in a timely fashion and had no sound. Ran completely smooth and flawless in Flash. Isn't progress (HTML5) great.

You should check your FF extensions. I had a very smooth experience on a much older setup: FF19, OS X 10.7.5, Core2Duo 2.9GHz (MaxBookPro late 2008), 4GB RAM.

I found that the HTML5 version tracked my mouse cursor more smoothly then Flash.

Re: Flash vs HTML - Waste Invaders

#22

Post by babuskov »

edoloughlin wrote: post #21
goggles99 wrote: post #18

Game ran like complete garbage in HTML5 (Firefox 19, Windows7 i7 2600, 12GB ram). It had a very low framerate, did not respond to mouse in a timely fashion and had no sound. Ran completely smooth and flawless in Flash. Isn't progress (HTML5) great.

You should check your FF extensions. I had a very smooth experience on a much older setup: FF19, OS X 10.7.5, Core2Duo 2.9GHz (MaxBookPro late 2008), 4GB RAM. I found that the HTML5 version tracked my mouse cursor more smoothly then Flash.

As long as your users have the same problem as goggles99, HTML5 will not be a technology to choose. It is more likely that they already have Flash installed, than being willing to "check their extensions".

BTW, HTML5 version runs really slow on my computer as well. FF1.9, Linux, Core2Duo 1.6GHz, 2GB RAM, while Flash one works flawlessly.

Re: Flash vs HTML - Waste Invaders

#23

Post by jandy »

That was an interesting comparison.

As others have said, no sound on the HTML5 version.

There were some minor differences between the two that I found interesting. The HTML5 scrolling would occasionally stutter; however, the Flash version suffered from some slight alignment issues in the tiles.

Overall I was very impressed by the HTML5 version, the two were almost impossible to tell apart. I doubt (apart from the obvious audio issue) I would've known which was which if I hadn't been told beforehand.

Re: Flash vs HTML - Waste Invaders

#24

Post by JackdawX »

wladimir wrote: post #14
arocks wrote: post #11

They could have also included some technical parameters like framerate, memory consumption or battery usage for the sake of comparison. Even if all browsers gain universal support for HTML5, we must remember that Flash can exist outside browsers. A lot of flash games are in circulation which are simply embedded inside Office documents. The actual Flash standalone runtime is only a few megabytes in size. Flash content…

someone can (in theory) develop a mobile friendly, efficient (and open source) runtime I don't think the format is documented to that level. And even if it is, it is very complex and hard to get right for other implementations (and it is a moving target controlled by one player, a bit like MS office formats). And why bother? If you have the choice, why not go with HTML5 which already has some good and very fast free…

> And why bother? If you have the choice, why not go with HTML5 which already has some good and very fast free implementations available?

Well, I think this demo kind of proves why not: it doesn't work the same way on everyones browser. We've been talking for years now about html5 games obsoleting flash, but it doesn't seem to be coming together does it? My opinion on why not? We've got some serious problems with the spec and the people producing the spec. Even with the infinite resources of google, the chrome browser is not actually 100% compliant! Is that even fixable at this late stage of the game?

> Or as you're implementing your own environment anyway, go completely native?

That doesn't really help you distribute your games safely over the web to multiple people. Also, cross platform development is actually quite time consuming and hard, and the performance benefeits vs a VM are not really worth it for the average 2D flash-type game.

Re: Flash vs HTML - Waste Invaders

#28

Post by wladimir »

JackdawX wrote: post #24
wladimir wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

someone can (in theory) develop a mobile friendly, efficient (and open source) runtime I don't think the format is documented to that level. And even if it is, it is very complex and hard to get right for other implementations (and it is a moving target controlled by one player, a bit like MS office formats). And why bother? If you have the choice, why not go with HTML5 which already has some good and very fast free…

> And why bother? If you have the choice, why not go with HTML5 which already has some good and very fast free implementations available? Well, I think this demo kind of proves why not: it doesn't work the same way on everyones browser. We've been talking for years now about html5 games obsoleting flash, but it doesn't seem to be coming together does it? My opinion on why not? We've got some serious problems with the…

> Well, I think this demo kind of proves why not: it doesn't work the same way on everyones browser.

Still, you are comparing this to flash, which has only one complete implementation at all which is only available on a subset of platforms and not open source. This number of platforms is decreasing, not increasing (ie, Android dropped).

> That doesn't really help you distribute your games safely over the web to multiple people.

Agreed, no one solved the problem of cross-platform application development (both desktop and mobile) yet. And flash doesn't succeed much, if any, better than HTML5 in this regard. But looking forward HTML5 looks more promising too me.

Re: Flash vs HTML - Waste Invaders

#29

Post by doublec »

wereHamster wrote: post #8
doomlaser wrote: post #6

The performance of the HTML5 version is smooth and quite impressive, but HTML5's achilles heel is sound. I didn't have any audio. This game aside, I still haven't played an HTML5 game with audio that wasn't plagued by high latency / other funkiness.

Sadly Firefox doesn't support the WebAudio API, only an older audio API. The WebAudio API was designed primarily by Google and is very nice. It's only supported by Chrome AFAIK. Last year at Google IO they had a talk about it. We use the API in our game, and it works great.

Nightly builds of Firefox are starting to get support for the Web Audio API, hidden behind a pref 'media.webaudio.enabled', which can be set in 'about:config'. At some point when it's considered more useable someone will blog about it and the state it's in.

Re: Flash vs HTML - Waste Invaders

#30

Post by StavrosK »

brazzy wrote: post #13
antihero wrote: post #2

HTML5 version ran WAY faster for me (Chromium Linux) but without sound :(

To me (Firefox on Windows 7), Flash seemed a little more responsive, but not radically so.

HTML5 ran faster for me as well. "Faster" as in "everything was sped up at 2x".
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