andyson:BUT! You are probably too young to know about
turntables that have adjustable speeds for playing 33 1/3 RPM or 45 RPM
and even 78 RPM records. (YJ would know them but you might need to
Google turntables and records. ;-) )
No Google necessary! I had a turn table that had a switch for 33 1/3
rpm or 45 rpm. I was a wee young lad of course, but I remember getting
great fun out of playing 33 1/3 records on the 45 rpm speed. Alvin and The Chipmunks singing The Jackson Five? Yes, please.
andyson: 30fps would be acceptable IMO.
Unfortunately, not for me. I ran this simulation a couple of times and the results were about what I expected.
My first run was in Firefox, my usual browser. Maximized window at 1920x1080. I restarted the browser before each run.
Test #1: 60fps sim, 10 swings
Results #1: Wasn't bad. Not quite as good as WGT in full screen, but reasonably playable.
Test #2: 30fps sim, 10 swings
Results
#2: Was pretty bad. The first 4 swings had a consistent meter speed. The amount of pixels the front of the meter was advancing per frame was
too much. I would guess 10-15px at a time. I also experienced "surging" towards the end
of the 10 swings.
Overall: My
precision on 60fps was quite small, on par with WGT. My precision on
30fps was downright awful.
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Second run was in Firefox, this time with Process Explorer running in the background.
It
is significant to note here that your SWFs use 25MB, whereas WGT is
using 156MB on initial load and over 200MB during round. Your app uses about 0.05% CPU at idle, 2-3% CPU during a swing. These is also significantly less than WGT CPU demands. Your background, as you mentioned, is a picture rather a series of layers for all of the GUI elements.
Again I ran Firefox, and the results were more or less the same, but not exactly the same. 60fps was still reasonably playable (but still not quite as good as the first run), 30fps was not and surged on me.
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When I launch full-screen on WGT an Adobe Flash window takes over. I think this is because I installed the stand-alone flash player and told Windows to open all SWF's with the stand alone. From what I understand talking to IRC buds, other users with Firefox do not experience the Adobe full-screen "takeover". They also tell me that their graphics are terrible in full screen, even with hardware acceleration on. These are people that have better video cards and better systems than me.
I found this interesting, so I opened up your sims in Flash 18's standalone player and launched them in full screen and re-ran the tests.
The 60fps meter rivaled the best performance I get on WGT with a fresh browser load. Better than the Firefox performance overall. The 30fps was now mostly playable, but there was still some jagged movement in the meter. The surging was minimized, but you could see that frames were missing.
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So, when Adobe takes over, results trend upwards for me. Running a SWF in Firefox directly is noticeably and in some cases tremendously worse.
For me, these results only confirm that WGT is doing its best to optimize Flash (likely on an ongoing base), and regardless of what they do Flash performance will vary from user to user, sometimes without regard to specifications or hardware.
Even simple flash apps such as these are subject to unpredictable performance and will vary for seemingly no reason at all.
I appreciate you taking the time to build these. Sorry for taking so long to respond. It's been a busy week.