Archive for category JavaScript

AS3 vs. JavaScript Performance Followup (November 2013)

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It’s been about seven months since my last test of AS3 versus JavaScript and there have been several major releases of both browsers and the Flash Player. Today, we pit every major browser against each other and Flash Player itself to get an updated picture of which provides the fastest scripting environment on the web.

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HTML5 Browser Support: October 2013

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Like it or not, HTML5 is all the rage these days. It seems like everyone, everywhere is talking about the “death of Flash” and the triumphant rise of HTML5 in its place. Many developers who would have used Flash are now considering building on top of HTML5 features like the <canvas> tag. This got me wondering: how well supported are these features across desktop and mobile browsers? I couldn’t find any existing stats on this, so today’s article is my own report. If you write your game in HTML5, what percentage of users will be able to see it? Read on for the answers.

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Flash vs. HTML5: Stage3D vs. WebGL

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WebGL is not ready for prime time. It’s just not available on enough of the browsers people actually use for any mass-market game to seriously target it. But what if everybody used browsers that supported WebGL right now? Would it be competitive then? Today’s article explores that question to find out just what kind of game you could make today to take advantage of HTML5 and WebGL and compares it to the performance you’d see had you gone with Flash’s Stage3D hardware acceleration.

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Flash vs. HTML5: Hardware-Accelerated Bitmap Rotation and Scaling

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Flash (mostly) won the first bitmap test against HTML5 but was then defeated once rotation and scaling entered the mix. Can Flash make a comeback by leveraging hardware acceleration via Stage3D? Today’s test finds out!

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Flash vs. HTML5: Bitmap Rotation and Scaling

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Normal bitmaps can be boring, so many games spice them up by rotating and scaling them for various purposes. Rotated characters can follow the curve of a 2D terrain in a game like Dragon, Fly!. Mario himself can scale up to huge size in New Super Mario Bros.. So today we continue the HTML5 vs. JavaScript series by testing the performance of rotating and scaling bitmaps to better compare the performance across Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android. Will Flash maintain its lead? Read on to find out.

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Flash vs. HTML5: Bitmap Drawing Speed

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HTML5 is all the rage and a lot of Flash developers are either curious about it or have actually made the switch. But how does its performance stack up against Flash? That is a very complicated question, so we’ll begin today with just a simple test of the speed at which a lot of bitmaps can be drawn to the screen. Who will win? Read on to find out.

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Optimizing AS3 with JavaScript

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Now that AS3 is performing slower than JavaScript in some areas, should we be looking to optimize our AS3 by offloading tasks to JavaScript? That may sound perverse, but the possibility of major speedups is tempting. Today’s article looks for speedups using Flash’s AS3-to-JavaScript bridge: ExternalInterface.

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AS3 vs. JavaScript Performance Followup (April 2013)

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It’s been about a year and a half since my last test of AS3 versus JavaScript and there have been several major releases of both browsers and the Flash Player. Today, we pit every major browser against each other and Flash Player itself to get an updated picture of which provides the fastest scripting environment on the web.

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AS3 vs. JavaScript Performance Followup (November 2011)

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It’s been about 8 months since my last test of AS3 versus JavaScript and there have been several major releases of both browsers and the Flash Player. Today, we pit every major browser against each other and Flash Player itself to get an updated picture of which provides the fastest scripting environment on the web.

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Pseudo Threads

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Eventually, Flash Player will support Worker Threads to take advantage of multi-core CPUs, but that may be quite a while from now. Today’s article shows you how you can get some concurrency right now by faking threads. Read on for the technique!

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