It's been a while since our last post, so it's time to dust off this a little.
Today I'll tell about my latest adventures on the journey to beat the final boss, Panzer Division Gold Version. A while ago, I became increasingly unhappy with the performance of PzDiv on iPad 1 so I decided to stop everything else and seek a solution to make it run smoother. Plain HTML/CSS/JavaScript is not working good enough on iPad no matter what, so was time to try something else.
We love HTML5 Games
I followed many leads but most of them were dead ends. The only interesting solutions were the so called hardware accelerated canvases - implementations of HTML5 Canvas API in native code.
There are quite a few of them, here are those that I investigated:
I know now which is better but I settled on CocconJS for the simple reason that:
- is free (at least for the moment)
- has a nice app on both iOS and Android so you can test you app asap
- PzDiv runs quite fast on it.
Even if we choosed for the moment CocconJS, I'm confident that we'll be able to migrate the code to the other frameworsk if needed - since they are all canvas based.
To canvas or not to canvas
The thing is PzDiv code is using CSS transitions, transforms, scrolls, all kinds of regular HTML stuff. All those things will not work anymore in a canvas only game and must be rewritten, redesigned, recreated. Sadly that will take a while.
It is a tough choice but I believe is the right thing to do. Till next time: keep calm and don't forget to be awesome!
