Ape Apps

bastecklein said:I don't know, between not only the My Colony code but all of the supporting scripts associated with it, we would be talking about a complete re-write of the game. We are talking about months of work. Might as well just make it 'My Colony 2' at that point.

That's right, but it might be a big improvement. I'm working as developer and sometimes I run into a problem that can only be solved by rewriting the code, which I just do.

Another option is the communication between JavaScript and Java (I assume you're using JavaScript when using a webview). Instead of using a webview, a Java rendering engine can be written for android (which is optimalized for the game), which communicates with the JavaScript game engine. This might also be a lot of work, but not as much as a complete rewrite. There already exist several interpreters for JavaScript, also one in Java.

A last option is using another built in webview in Android, but I won't recommend that. It will take the game slow and maybe it won't support everything that the google webview supports...

It might be a lot of work, but turning the engine into Java will solve many problems. Android is based on Java, all desktop operating systems will support it if java is installed. Only iOS needs the JVM to be included. To upgrade performance, you can use OpenGL, which can also solve the wrong depth overlapping problem...

I'm playing my colony for at least one year now, and in that time, many major updates came to the game, such as lighting effect and day-night cycles. I really like that update, but lighting effects have a very high impact on the game performance on android devices, and maybe (not tested) also on iOS. On my laptop this problem does not really show up, except that the laptop has to do large calculations (which it usually did when playing my colony). I tried other engine settings that could speed up performance, but they all have no (or just a little bit) impact on the game. Unfortunately, I had to disable the lighting feature and switched to day only mode because that was the only way to get rid of the problem.

I already have some suggestions how this could be fixed (I suggest not to read this if you're no software developer):
The amount of light could be stored for every tile, then render each tile with specific brightness. This could speed up game performance, but removes detail. Colored light is still supported, and light simulations can be done more accurately in less performance (think of minecraft lighting). Another problem is that this game is a web app (as far as I know), and web apps are low performance because code is not compiled. Switching completely to native java on android could fix many performance problems. This requires a lot of work, but makes android devices perform better. I also suggest switching to WebGL (as far as I know, this isn't currently implemented), on webviews and browsers that have support for it. This does rendering calculations using a GPU, which is especially made for that task. Android does have similar APIs for it as well. And as a web developer, I know this is a very complex task, since OpenGL is complex itself.

Combining those three suggestions together, the lighting problem could be solved.

Does someone have other suggestions, and is the lighting performance problem ever going to be fixed?