Browser Speed

[KGB]

SnotlinG, Piranha,

What kinds of game speeds are you getting on your browsers. By game speed I mean how responsive is the game, movement etc.

On my home PC I have a large screen resolution (1900x1200) and a reasonably decent PC (3 year old CPU but new graphics card) and I use Firefox. The game for me is quite smooth in terms of moving the map around, watching unit stacks move etc.

Recently however due to a some trips I've ended up having to play turns on other PC's (a 2 year old laptop using Firefox, an internet cafe machine using Explorer, a friends 2 years old PC using Explorer). On everyone of these the resolution was much lower than my own (1280 at best). What was worse was that the game was BRUTALLY slow. As in, I click on a stack, I click on a move and start the move and it would be 20 seconds to complete that action by the time the stack moved (compared to 2 seconds on my machine). A turn that would take 2-3 minutes to complete on my machine would be 15 on theirs due to screen resolution and speed of the game.

This kind of delay is going to make speed games impossible to play for most people. In fact many players may not even realize how slow they are moving/playing relative to others. So it makes me wonder if speed games are going to be very feasible for many players unless you have come kind of correction factor (as in you time a move on player 1's PC and it's 2 seconds to calculate and on player 2's PC it's 10 seconds so player 2 gets 5X as much time on their turn) built in to compensate for speed of machine differences.

KGB

[flash]

I made good experiences using google chrome instead of firefox. The game seems to run much faster on it.

[dantheman]

In my experience at least is has much more to do with the speed of the internet connection than the speed of the computer. I play on a three-year-old laptop and Firefox. When I am on a fast internet connection, like at home or my work (don't tell the boss!) the game runs quickly. When I'm at a coffee shop it can be brutally slow.

I'm not sure if anything can be done about this. If the problem is connection speed and not computer speed then i suppose there might be ways to reduce the amount of data that must be sent back and forth. You guys might keep this in mind as you design the new graphics. It might be nice to have a "lo-res" option for people whose internet connections or computers can't handle detailed graphics.

[KGB]

DanTheMan,

Yup, internet connection speed does factor into things. But in at least 1 of the cases I was at a friends house and he only has 1 PC connected to his high speed connection. So in that instance internet speed couldn't have been a factor.

I also *always* notice a specific slowdown even on my home machine when moving stacks on heavy terrain (woods/hills/swamp) if no unit in the stack has a move bonus. I can literally *see* the stack moving along at normal speed on a road/open plain and then drop to 1/2 speed when crossing heavy terrain. That I assume is calculation based and thus CPU bound in the local java script.

But you are right, a low-res option might be a good idea. Or the ability to cache graphic content for regular player so that graphics are available locally instead of coming from the server.

It's an unfortunate problem but one that is probably going to make speed games a no-go for most players until some/all of this gets fixed. Requiring a Chrome browser or a blazing fast internet connection to play a turn based game doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

It might be nice for a couple of players to YouTube some movement on their machine so we can compare experiences.

KGB

[piranha]

Its an interesting topic.

We keep testing the game in FF, Chrome IE and Opera to test all the functionality.
Obviously we need to make sure that the game runs as fast as possible for everyone.
But no matter what we do chome/opera is going to much faster since the game is in javascript.

The internet connection will factor when you play the first time the most but when images are cached it wont reload them again. There are differences here as well, chrome is caching more than FF so when we update a graphic chrome will
display the old version for a couple of days while FF show the new graphic. Its great when you develop that your change is visible in FF but from a speed perspective it will give chrome an advantage here aswell. There are cache options in the browser but 99% are probably using the default anyway.

When you have loaded the game and the graphics is loaded there is not a lot of traffic going to the server, there are ajax checks sent to make sure that there is no cheating going on but its minimal information. The game isn't waiting for those checks, it will continue to play and then popup an out of sync error if the response from the server doesn't happen fast enough. Slowing down while move around sounds like javascript speed issue / unoptimized code. You could at least give it a testing in another browser and if you see a difference you know that its not the connection.

We will test the speed version and see how it does works. I'm okay that some things are faster in a specific browser, I want to take advantage of the possiblities there is. Its like comparing modern 3d games and graphics cards. If somone have an old graphics card new 3d games wont be smooth since game developers want to take advantage of the latest stuff and everyone is ok with that. There is a free "graphics card" out there called chrome / opera and if you want the best surfing performance thats what you want to get.

If you want the best developing tools go for FF and firebug.
If you want the slowest most memory consuming option there is always IE .

There is a lot of focus to catch up in performance for the other browser makers. IE9 is supposed to be almost as fast as Chrome and FF is getting faster with each version so this game should be smooth for everyone, even IE users in the not to far future.