HTML5 not working on Huawei Y550

Questions
#1

hello,
Defold looks great and is exactly what I’m looking for in terms of goals & philosophy.
In particular lightweight HTML5 export.
On PC (chrome) the examples work fine: http://www.defold.com/tutorials/examples/

So my first instinct was to test them on my Android mobile (Huawei Y550 - android 4.4.4 + chrome 49.0.2623.91)

But the page doesn’t show the example. Instead there is a text:
“This is only an example game and is not published on mobiles stores, open the page on a laptop to try out the HTML5 build […]”
(On the same mobile but using built-in browser an additional text is displayed “Game cannot start, WebGL not supported” ==> ok it’s normal because built-in browser does’nt support webGL.)
I tried all other pages but the same text “This is only…” is displayed instead of the game.

As a side note, I observed that Chrome crashes a lot when I navigate in the website.

I also tested with this page:
http://www.cgamoment.com/cosmic/play.html
and it works, but the game doesn’t seem designed for small screens.

Is there another HTML page in which I could test “simple” demos?

#2

The examples technically work on mobile but HTML5 support on mobile platforms is overall pretty bad. Most devices don’t give good performance (even if they support WebGL) and the experience is sub-par. For instance, the “Cosmic Crescendo” example you posted runs, but with low framerate on my pretty new iPad. That is why we have disabled mobile viewing of the examples.

If you want to develop games on mobile I strongly suggest you build a native app.

#3

Well, I have to explain my goal, because Cosmic crescendo was obviously not designed for mobile (loading is super long, controls use keyboard).

My initial goal was to develop simple and light games for the web, because the internet is now accessible from everywhere, does’nt require to install an app, and an URL is something which is easy to communicate to other people by mail, social networks. And many people continue to navigate on the internet as for “fun”, or looking for interesting experiences, without prior notion of they are looking for, pleasure of discovery. And a game can be something quite interesting.

Check http://html5games.com/ for examples perhaps not corresponding to the standard of how a game “should” be, but at least some perform quite well on mobile (example I just pick randomly: http://html5games.com/Game/Rival-Rush/2eb55364-154f-40b4-b701-f029678d8e81 )

I don’t see why Defold proposal - which seems closely related to performance and optimal use of available resources (bandwidth, CPU) - would be contradictory with “web game playable on mobile”.
If you know that the runtimes has some special characteristics (for example using more RAM to save CPU or any other technical reason) that make Defold not web-mobile friendly, I would be happy to know them in order to work-around them, or choose another tool.

#4

The main issue (in general) is that mobile web games have extra constraints due to the lack of support of web technologies that many mobile browsers have. So, if you want to support as many mobile web browsers, you must cut available features, and make a more simple game. Defold has emphases mostly on native mobile apps out of all other targets. I would bet that a majority of those games you link to were made with tools that put emphases first on mobile web games (such as http://phaser.io/ ). Defold could certainly, most likely be more optimized for mobile web, and maybe even have ability to gracefully disable features as the devices running Defold apps do not support them, but still it’s obvious that native mobile apps are the best use case for making games with Defold right now, and if you need to make mobile web apps as a priority right now you should consider other tools.

#5

@Pkeod thanks

#6

I think you could try building your app, bundle it for HTML5, and create a local server on your network which serves that content to you phone. That way you can test it much more thoroughly. I haven’t done this with a mobile phone though, so I’d have to direct you to a search on the web on how to set up servers on your network.

Also, there are other examples in the wild. Such as:
http://britzl.github.io/lowrezinvaders/
http://britzl.github.io/publicexamples/

And, there are a few finished games as well (that we know about) that are available on the web:
(from this list)

http://digitalservicesbydigitopolisstudio.com/HelpHero/
http://www.yeaboing.com/cakepop/Puzzle.html
http://www.csc.kth.se/~dmans/totem/

#7

thank you for all the links!

After checking most of them on my mobile, I now understand what @sicher said.
Defold is definitely not for web mobile at the moment: even for the simple demos, the playback is jerky, controls are not very responsive…

I hope Defold team will improve this in the future (although I guess King is probably not interested at all by web mobile :/…)

#8

There is a fundamental difference how Defold HTML5 works. The runtime is translated to javascript which works fine on the desktop. Unity HTML5 takes a similar approach. If you want to build a web app for mobile you probably want to work in javascript directly and have fine-tuned control of rendering, manual on a canvas, for instance.

Performance in Defold HTML5 can probably be improved but the cross compilation to javascript (or webasm in the future) layer will most likely stay.

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#9

I totally agree with previous replies. If you wish to build games for mobile phones either build them using a tool such as Defold, Unity or Cocos2D and bundle your code as a native app OR choose a performant HTML5 game framework such as Phaser (and expect better performance using native apps).

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