Crabs!

Please give your Android phone a healthy dose of crabs, and then after as much finger tapping as you can muster, report your phone and framerate back here :slight_smile: If you are too cool to own an Android phone but instead have one of them fancy Apple things, well… meh. I’d do something for my iPad too except I a) have to learn a new and inferior language b) have to ask Apple nicely c) have to learn a new IDE d) have to rewrite all my libraries it’s taken me 8 years to make e) have to use a crappy Mac.

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=350x350&chl=http%3A%2F%2Fdl.dropbox.com%2Fu%2F1199028%2FMinimalAndroid.apk

Cas :slight_smile:

I filled the screen with crabs, every time I saw a gap I added more, no idea how many, it sometimes dipped to 27fps, but always settled to 30. HTC Sensation.

Endolf

Cute little crabs. Revenge of the Crabs? Started with 30 but dipped down to ~5fps after a full screen/shed-loads of the little sods. HTC Desire.

Yup got a few reports here that the Desire leaves a little to be, er, desired. Seems it can’t cope with the circles (which aren’t sprites - they’re arbitrary geometry inserted into the sprite engine pipeline, and drawn transparent). I suspect it’s transparent fill rate that’s screwing the Desire. I’ll have to go easy on effects :S

Cas :slight_smile:

Filled the entire screen with craps… err crabs, fps stable at about 27.

Galaxy s i9000

Ran at 30FPS with well over a hundred crabs on my Samsung Galaxy S i5500 w/ CyanogenMod 7. You need a crab counter, because I lost count.

For the lazy, here’s a QR code for the download URL:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=350x350&chl=http%3A%2F%2Fdl.dropbox.com%2Fu%2F1199028%2FMinimalAndroid.apk

Install Failed Older SDK

Android 2.2+

Cas :slight_smile:

I found a bug. I tested it with huawei ideos x5 and could get about 30crabs but those circles slowed frame rate to 15fps. Then I closed the demo and forget it. After many hours I turned my keylock off and demo was still running on screen even if I have allready closed it and done other things beetween it.

It does actually pause and unpause but it won’t get killed unless Android decides to kill it to make way for something else. I’ll try to add a bit more lifecycle control into it.
I’m wondering whether I should run it at 60fps - it seems any phone capable of 60fps can cope with the circles anyway, and phones that can’t cope with the circles are a bit shafted whatever.

Cas :slight_smile:

Update the test to have it optional to do 30/60 fps and have it display number of crabs.

You could always to a benchmark app that starts at 60fps, adds crabs automagically for a while, till it runs out of fps, then drop back to 30 for a bit, then upload the results of number of crabs/circles and phone make/model to a google app engine service, so it’s all done for you :slight_smile:

Endolf

The crabs test isn’t really a good performance metric though - in reality we’ll be using 5 or 6 textures per frame, with maybe 30-40 state changes, and there’s likely to be a large number of opaque sprites in the background as well instead of them all being translucent… I’m deliberately limiting the fps to 30 so I can tune the games to work on more phones. We’re going to be a bit less about action I think with the phone games, so 60fps isn’t quite so important.

Cas :slight_smile:

tested actually some other, not as powerful phones with it, and some get slow very quickly, like 1 crab equals 1 fps

but those phones cannot play all android market games fluently anyway, especially those RPGs and whatnot

Yeah, that’s just it, isn’t it - no point in aiming so low that everybody gets a shitty experience. I’m thinking of maybe specifying minimum SDK of 2.3 which should filter out nearly everything crappy. And 90% of our potential customers. But with millions of new customers appearing every year, and the 2 year upgrade cycle that contract phones have, I suppose that’s not a big deal. I think I’ll be happy if we make £10k out of Titan Attacks for Android.

Cas :slight_smile:

Well, Godspeed ! =D

Samsung Galaxy S. Fps: 27 - 30, no matter how many crabs were on screen.
Look forward to Titan on Android :slight_smile:

Advent Vega (Tablet). After about 100 crabs drops to 16-17FPS. Still!! Better than my HTC Desire.

More crabs! This one’s optimised for dual-core CPUs, and should be a bit faster generally all round even on a single core. I get to about 400 crabs at 60fps before I can’t actually make any more crabs appear because I can’t tap fast enough (must enable multi-touch input! hehe)

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1199028/MinimalAndroid.apk

Does anyone know of a little CPU monitor graph I can go and look at after running it?

Quick tweak to get it to generate 10 crabs per tap sees me get the Galaxy up to 2500 crabs and still @ 60fps. boggle Each of these sprites is animated, rotated, scaled, tinted, and alpha-blended. This phone is like a supercomputer! Not so long ago we were aiming at 1500 sprites max on the desktop! (The Alien Flux days)

Cas :slight_smile:

The circles really kill the FPS for me around 2000 crabs. I get about 5 fps when they’re being drawn, and it scoots back up when the circles go away. I’m only getting around 40FPS with 2000 crabs tho, but I’m running on a power-saving governor that might be slowing it down just as CPU goes.

I’m still surprised the circles are so abysmally slow - they’re only, like, 128 triangles each. How many crabs can you get whilst still @ 60fps?

Cas :slight_smile: