Starling slot

tywang2006

Hi guys,

I need to do some slot engine in starling. so far as i know, i want to do the reel very flexiable to update very easily. at the moment, what i tried was building a class extended Quad to update the texture by bitmapdata in the real time based on new data. I found the performance is really bad. I need to use copypixel of bitmapdata function to render differnt part of the icons. I'd prefer to do copypixel on texture that will be totally rely on GPU.

Daniel

Have you looked at the RenderTexture class? That should be exactly what you're looking for.

tywang2006

I am going to try it. I heard someone said it has bad performance:) Thank you very much. I will post the result later:)

IonSwitz

If you do copyPixels from your bitmapData every frame you are wasting CPU. Blit them once to Textures in Starling and watch your performance go crazy. Do bitmapdata to Starling caching at the initialization of your game, not every frame.

antara

I am not sure how you want to do it. We do have a slot machine written with starling and don't use any of the stuff you said.

If you elaborate, I might be able to help you.

jonathanhart

I built a slot machine game with starling and we used QuadBatch, it's quite performant provided you only render what you need to (in most cases its 25 reel symbols max)

tywang2006

I want a very flexible reel actually, so i can change layout in config at very beginning, actually what i did just caculate icon indexs and offset for each icon then rendering them on the screen, it will be super fast and can be available to do unlimited spinning.

I did try renderTexture, its performance not boost a lot and wont show much difference with rendering based on bitmapdata to texture. and there is another issue is that it wont be possible to implement blur when speed changes. it kills the performance.

Is there any way i can do high efficient blur in renderTexture? for bitmapdata, its super fast and just apply the filter then update texture with that bitmapdata.

both of way need 15% cpu usage at most.

tywang2006

For each reel, maybe there r more than 100 symbols for each reel.

I did draw in drawBundled of RenderTexture

In order to make the slot more flex and test performance, i did big icons

layout of the slot is

xxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxx
xxxxx
xxx
x

so it is a very weird and big layout for reel spinning.

IonSwitz

The BlurFilter in Starling works fine for this, but there is no need for you to use the bitmapData during rendering.

Just blitting an Image for each reel symbol works fine, and you can apply a BlurFilter to the image. Remember, though, that one BlurFilter instance should only be applied to one object at a time, otherwise it gets slow.

tywang2006

Sorry, i'm rookie. May I ask a stupid question. I use scout to check the performance. why it got randomly cpu usage randomly between debug and release mode in idle, it show enterFrame but I didnt run any enterFrame code.

I do implement blurfilter. I wrote each reel extending from Quad and attached it with renderTexture to draw from symbol image inialised already. it looks extremely slow.

That is weird

tywang2006

And if I defined blurfilter to each reel(base class:quard) and dynamically update blurX based on the current speed.

it will get error below

It's currently not possible to stack filters! This limitation will be removed in a future Stage3D version.

tywang2006

When I check the performance in scout, it said in RenderTexture.draw,

Function 27%
Object 27%
Closure 27%

when it is in idle

it shows

starling event handling "enterFrame"

how to reduce it or is there another way to improve it?

tywang2006

finally finally, i got idle to 0 and spinning under 10% cpu.

But when i tried Blurfilter, it just kills performance totally.

because I need to update renderTexture every frame. Is there any much better way to implement blur filter with dynamic changed blurY or blurX?

or i have to do blur image then render them when spinning? that looks very bad

jonathanhart

tywang have you tried this one out? supposedly it is much faster:

http://forum.starling-framework.org/topic/code-much-faster-gaussian-blur-implementation

tywang2006

I did test but fail, not sure whats going on. I wrote texture in quad calling render:support.batchQuad

I check that example and not sure how to make it with my situation:(

tywang2006

still very slow:(

henke37

This sounds like you just want a TextureAtlas and no RenderTexture.

tywang2006

no, it is not that simple to use textureAtlas. it is totally not workinig for my case.

At the moment, i am very happy with what i have done so far for the slot 12 x 7 layout (crazy size)

and it is able to decide spin stop result dynamically when spinning. only issues is for bluring.

You can imagine it will cause the big issue with that when needed in such crazy layout. anyway it is

just experienment. I checked other land based slot wrote in C++, they cant make it as well. However,

I will still need to invest it. the worst situation is just spinning with blur symbol assets then

stop/start spin with normal one. we just cant change blur value based on spinning speed.