About flash in a flash contest

I have a question about the contest. How important is the performance of the game for the judges? I am thinking of submitting my game so I have been testing it. In my desktop computer it runs pretty decent but on my laptop it runs very slow, I guess mainly because it has a very basic graphics card. I have seen some good flash games around here in the forum but when I run two of them at the same time in my laptop they both slow down significantly.

If performance is important for the contest, at least I'd like to know what hardware specs should I consider when testing my game so I can keep it simple to avoid performance issues.

 

I think you cant worry about optimization for a 2 weeks project.
Theres just no time for that.

 

I'm in the same boat as you! The Flash builds really don't seem to scale down to slower machines well. I made a slightly better labeled post about it here before seeing this.

 

I think it would be considered part of technical otherwise we would all make it look good and have it run at 2FPS

 

Yeah, I'm still modelling and texturing stuff, and still have a heap to bugfix/program. I'm keeping my models low poly (hides my crapness) but I still don't expect it to run well on low end machines as I just don't have time to optimise. I considered doing a few different LOD versions of my models to begin with, but as I'm using some image effects and won't have any time to script extensive menus to toggle options then I didn't see the point.

Haven't tested on my Macbook Pro yet but my 4 year old C2D desktop system with an ATI 4XXX series GPU has never dipped below 60fps in the flash builds unless I use soft shadows but they're buggy with image effects so I'm not using them. I'd have to borrow a machine to test with integrated graphics.

 

aiursrage2k: Have you tried running Flash builds on laptops? They seem to have about a 20th of the performance they would otherwise. Unity Flash runs fine, if ugly, on most discrete graphics cards, but on both my MacBook and MATLAB machines Unity can't perform in Flash.

Cameron: Totally agreed. My graphics are plenty simplistic, and more importantly, run fine in standalone and .unity web plugin builds.

 

Well I have and what I found that I had to disable my dynamic shadows entirely or the framerate was beyond crap (and it was only doing the ball and the flag).

 

We judge the entire experience. We won't be judging on purposely super low end hardware. but if your content runs at 2fps on a decent machine, the content better be something like chess where it doesn't matter so much

 

The fix (for my project) for avoiding this performance problem in this build of Unity's Flash support: don't call FixedUpdate(). My performance went up drastically when I moved logic from FixedUpdate() into Update() instead. I'll have to take some measures to throttle so my physics updates run less than every-single-frame, but as my logic is only based on responding to physics changes and not affecting them, I'll be fine moving that code out of FixedUpdate().

 

May I know if the tests machines have a GPU at least sequivalent to or higher than ATI Radeon HD4850 / Geforce 9800GTX ?

 

As long as it's not being judged while running on an integrated GPU I'll be happy.