

Show HN: From Zero to the Appstore - My ebook on HTML5 mobile games - olsn
http://indiegamr.com/zerotoappstore/

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ddon
In my experiments, canvas performance on iOS devices is horrible, and
especially with Phonegap... it takes from 100..200 ms to draw a single frame,
crazy... Try opening iPad
<http://funwithhtml5.com/source/reportCanvasBug.html> and try to rotate iPad
and see how from 1..2 ms per frame it goes to 200ms per frame.

I am playing right now with Ejecta which translates JavaScript to ObjectiveC,
and then I get a very good speed, no matter how I rotate the screen.

~~~
city41
Ejecta doesn't translate to Objective-C, rather the canvas calls get
translated to OpenGL.

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meleemistress
Looks like it has some good info, but you need a copy editor. If I'm going to
shell out $30 for a book, I don't want to see typos and strange run-on
sentences. Those sorts of things make the book much harder to read.

For example, take your home page: "You’re interested in making games or other
interactive HTML5 apps, but you don’t quite know were to start and what you
will need to accomplish that."

That should be "where", not "were".

~~~
dubcanada
I have to agree, you could find a English copywriter fairly easy to do a quick
read over.

For example...

The canvas is a native HTML-element that can be used to draw and alternate
images and render its output to an HTML document. Drawing-methods can be
accessed directly through the context of the canvas, however EaselJS will add
a layer of abstraction to the canvas by automatically handling all drawing
calls so that all you have to do is placing the images and calling
stage.update().

"so that all you have to do is >placing< the images"

"that can be used to draw and >alternate< images >and< render its output"
(missing comma, run on sentence, alternate is probably the wrong word, I'd use
change or replace.)

"The Stage is >so to say< the bottom-most container." That doesn't make any
sense to me, I'm Canadian so maybe it is a saying elsewhere but I've never
heard "is so to say".

~~~
olsn
Okay, yes I can see why that could be an issue - I will look into getting a
copywriter - do you have any experience/suggestions for that, what is a
reasonable price?

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olsn
Any thoughs on this? Since this is my first release of this kind, feedback of
any kind would be very valuable to me.

Thank you all in advance :)

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SimianLogic2
has anyone had success with an html5 game on ios? it seems viable for android
(v8 yay!), but i haven't been satisfied at all with javascript performance on
iOS. maybe for something that's turn-based and doesn't require slick
transitions?

(edit: this sounds a little negative... what i mean is, pointing to a really
slick html5 game on the app store would make selling the book a lot easier)

~~~
olsn
You are probably right! Good point, I should probably add that to the page.

There are some CocoonJS games in the store, you can see some here:
<http://ludei.com/games> CocoonJS will give your HTML5 game native performane.

~~~
dubcanada
I think you need to rethink your terms.

Native performance is wrong, javascript (unless it's like asm.js or something)
will never be "native performance".

All CocoonJS is, is just a OpenGL layer with html/css/javascript support. And
while it is faster then just flat out using JSC. It is not faster then
c/objective c + opengl.

There have also been several reports of CocoonJS actually being slower then
UIWebView. A simple google search for "cocoonjs performance" returned several
issues.

~~~
olsn
That is not entirely correct - UIWebView canvas rendering is far behind OpenGL
layers like CocoonJS, Ejecta or directCanvas(AppMobi) in terms of performance
- the difference however is, that those tools are able to ONLY render canvas-
contents, so you are not really able to render any HTML5 forms, input ect...
but that's not what canvas-games are about.

~~~
dubcanada
It still uses Javascript. Native OpenGL+ObjC/C (done correct) will always be
faster. All it really is, is better performance then UIWebView as it doesn't
have all the webcore/kit stuff.

ALl I'm getting at is saying "native performance" is not correct. In a world
where even 2-3 FPS can mean a usable game or a not usable game. I think the
terminology matters a lot.

But you should still recommend people to using those solutions, just don't
pass them off as something they are not.

~~~
olsn
Okay, I agree with that - I'll change that :)

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userium
Don't know how big is the target market for this, but it shows that you put
lots of work in this, the website and sample chapters look great!

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0x4c
The artwork of the book cover and your dynamic background looks like it was
'inspired' by Fez.

~~~
olsn
Many things inspired me during the process - but yes, I won't deny that there
is also a little bit of "Fez" in there :)

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asimjalis
Looks great.

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danso
I'm guessing this book is more about the process than the actual coding
aspect, given its length (129 pages)? Though I do like the prototype and the
fact that the OP came from AS3/Flash into this, which hopefully provides some
interesting perspective.

