Wrath of the browsers

Almost half a year has passed since my initial HTML5 performance test. Most browsers have seen various updates and Construct 2 has improved a lot for sure. Time to give this another whirl.

The good news is that the average fps count has risen from a measly 27.6 to 39.8, which means a considerable improvement of 44,2%. Not bad at all.

Let's have a look at the cold hard facts:

Apple's Safari gives quite the phoenix out of the ashes performance and rises from a non-existent framerate the last time to the bronze medal, beating Firefox by 4 fps. While the Mozilla browser can improve and is about one third faster than it was with version 4.0, I still hoped for Firefox to make the leap to the top this time.

Can you do that with HTML5?

I have already been babbling about what Construct 2 is capable of doing in its current state. Now in the light of the previous post, where I demonstrated a way to create a sun effect, I was wondering... could this be done already in C2?

Let's have a look at a list of features/objects I have been using for that sun in Construct 1:

- sprite object

- gradient object

- additive effect

- color filter

- distort map

- hash table object
- delta time 
- while loop
- rotation behavior
- global variables

Green color means it is already available in C2, red colored features are only available in C1. That doesn't look too promising to be honest. But let's give it a quick shot anyway!

Construct 2 you say?!?

We do have Construct 2 public previews for a while now. Despite of it being still very basic in terms of features, the most impressive thing about it might be that if you used the previous Construct version before, you intuitively already know how to handle version 2. And at the same time it feels very slick and more user-friendly already.

But what is it that you can actually already create in Construct 2? Some pretty impressive examples can be found inside this thread. There are already little versions of Asteroids, Super Mario and Pong. Granted, these demos mostly only scratch the surface of the games they try to emulate, but considering the early state of C2 I'm pleased with the outcome so far.

Here's hoping that all major browsers will adapt hardware-accelerated HTML5 canvases yesterday (I'm looking at you, Firefox!). And that we will get to see some important features soon in C2, namely an integrated image editor and animations. A recent most wanted features poll indicates that this might happen soon. Other than that I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the soon addition of an OpenGL exe-exporter.