Cocos2d-x and poor updates!

Hello Everyone,

For the past several months I’ve been completely disappointed in the releases for cocos2d-x.
I don’t mean to disrespect the cocos2d-x team, But here are some issues that you guys need to consider. Since September 17th (approx. 8 months) there has been 3 releases of cocos2dx. The past 8 months, these releases didn’t even have major changes in them according to me. It seems to me that every release you guys focus on removing retain/release (Highlight of the Release) from cocos2d-x which is not even significant according to some other problems with cocos2d-x. On the other it is great that you have updated to chipmunk 7.0 and released support for Tizen.

#1:Android performance is clearly not up to mark.

Most users of cocos2dx use it for iOS and Android. Android has major performance issues with cocos2dx that really need your attention. Unity on the other doesn’t have such major issues.

There have been countless posts on this issue, and it has yet to be addressed. Several of many are mentioned below.
























#1 -2:I’ve also addressed this issue a few times. Here’s one.

In this post I’ve mentioned a few things which might be causing the problem. No fix was applied to later versions.

#2: Will we see full gradle support anytime soon?

#3: Current 3d support, makes it near impossible to start a big game for 3d.

#4: Apple tv support, Not a difficult task for you guys and a lot of people are asking for this.

There are still over 350 warnings in the code… will it remain this way?
Trello: Last updated on March 17-21st. and before that Feb 22.

I hope you guys find this post useful.

Thanks!

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Thank you for taking the time to write this post. I am going to share it with the team to read.

Let me comment on

  1. I think we realize that we are not a full service 3D engine at this point. I honestly don’t know the status of 3D and what the plan for the future is.

  2. Please see a few thread for Apple TV:
    Building for the new AppleTV / tvOS and AppleTV support. In Game/Demo Showcase there are several games woking on Apple TV

  3. There are still over 350 warnings in the code… will it remain this way? - Yes, I think that we know this and it is on the roadmap to clean up.

  4. Trello - AFAIK, we do still use Trello. When I send your thoughts to the team, they will see this.

yes, good points. thanks for the feedback.

we don’t have a lot of bandwidth… so we need help from the community.

I started tvOS port, but I couldn’t finish it because I started working on something else. But it would be great if someone can continue my work.
Some features are being developed for the US market, and others for the Chinese market. That’s why people might think that removing retain/release is not important. But actually it was a very important feature for the Chinese market.

Hey,

Thanks for replying :smile:

What about the android performance issues?Way too many people have a problem with this. Will there be updates on that? @ricardo @slackmoehrle

I don’t make decisions as to what goes on the road map. One of the people I asked to read your post was @zhangxm and he is in charge of Cocos2d-x releases and planning. I (or someone) will update this topic with a plan about what we are going to do.

regarding help from community, I think there is also big issue on your side as you not working with active members closely.

Guy who ported cocos2d-x to Apple TV and created post in forum(so we now able to compile it for Apple TV), was making lot’s of fixes for cocos2d-x and sending them to git for merge, but nothing from his code was merged from your side(just all proposed fixes was ignored from your side). So there was no point for him to continue contribute to cocos2d-x and you lost valuable member.

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probably you are right. And I’m sorry for that.
We have many open pull request. And we should work on them.

I think the Android performance issues are the most important.
It seems to happen only Android 6.0 + QHD devices. I’m not sure why.

Ricardo. I have nothing but admiration for you and your skills; if not for you we would not be here - so this is not criticism of you, in any way.

But PLEASE use whatever influence you have to stop the ‘ohhh! look, shiny!!’ and concentrate on a few ‘stabilisation’ sprints!

sound - come on - we all know sound support in Cocos is plain awful - especially on Android.
Android generally is a second class citizen - it needs sone serious development resources to sort out the issues.
3D. I would suggest splitting the engines - have cocos2d-x and cocos3d-x - then developers can choose which one to use and engine developers can concentrate on optimisations of one or the other.
release schedule. Honestly - stop releasing new versions so frequently and instead concentrate on quality. QUALITY is what will make cocos2d-x the engine of choice.

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Thanks. I’ll do my best. After I finish the VR thing I’ll work on fixing bugs, fixing bugs, fixing bugs and other low-hanging-fruits features like tvOS.
@ShunLin is that Ok for you?

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Does fixing bugs include low performance on android issues? lol :stuck_out_tongue:

@ricardo i posted a bug on this forum:http://discuss.cocos2d-x.org/t/cocos2d-x-3-11-prebuild-cocos2d-x-libs-failed/29272/4 i think this is a very serious bug, but, no one to respond me until today,this bug seems to be ignored,could you help me, please?

yes.

I’m sorry, but I’m not familiar with cocos gen-libs. In fact I was against of including that feature in cocos. I don’t think it should be there. But since it is there we should support it, but as I said, I’m not familiar with it.

@b12345 Thanks for the feedback. I just come to take in charge of cocos2d-x these days, i worked for creator in the previous moths.

I think i handles PR and issues actively these days. But because there are so many existing PRs and issues, i can not handle all of them quickly. Sorry about it. But i will do my best.

As the plan of cocos2d-x, i think i will focus on existing codes without adding big features. As @ricardo said, we are lack of bandwidth. And i will put these things in high priority:

Though i can not make decision of all the things. But i will do my best, and please point out what you think is wrong or missing. Thanks again.

Yes, it is Ok to me. And the performance issues of android 6 should be the most important one.

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There are issues for the tasks:

About full gradle support, did you mean

  • edit C/C++ codes in Android Studio?
  • build/debug C/C++ codes in Android Studio?

But we can not achieve it currently because of gradle native supporting limitation of Android Studio. More detail information please refer to this ticket.

Sorry for jump in middle.
Regarding Android-6 poor performance, I want to share my recent experience.

I just made 1 endless game for client and it has lots of physics bodies with 3 cameras.

I was creating all elements at init and just changing position at run time.
It has group of Physics elements in 6 layers so i was just setting position of layer as player moves.

For iPhone it was smooth game-play but for android it was very jerky/gliches during game-play.
For Android 6.0(including Samsung galaxy s7) it has more problem compare to older OS versions.

So i almost tried everything to make it good for 10 days, and finally i had good output by using only 1 camera(the default camera) and create elements when that layer suppose to come on screen and removing from layer when that elements gets out of screen on every time.

I hope this can help you to figure out problem some how.

I can compile v3.11 with cocos gen-libs -c just fine, iOS and Android.

I replied to you in that thread.

@zhangxm
Just out of curiosity how many developers are working on the engine full time ? not the editor .

The development resources of engine framework and editors are sharing now, and we should make sure that engine framework is high quality, high performance and editor friendly.
The resources are assigned to engine framework task dynamically.

It depends on how many critical/major bugs and feedbacks we received from community and how many features we are developing.