Why Chrome? Because it is by far the fastest (at the time of writing this article). Therefore, if the code doesn’t work

Note: the Chrome FPS Meter does not measure performance of a game that runs inside an iframe tag. If the rest of the page is static, the tool tells that no frame was dropped; doesn’t matter how bad can be the performance of the iframed game.

The weight of game logic, even with the AI of creatures working, is negligible. Running the game without painting takes 0.1 ms or less. Therefore, we will no longer discuss the logic of the game in this article.

So we believe in our Javascript code or in the Chrome FPS Meter? We can believe both. And more than believe them, believe in the experience we have playing the game: is it smooth or not?

We can see that the average time needed to execute the painting (which is the bottleneck) is 1.7 ms. Much lower than the strict limit of 3 ms that we chose. The worst case was 2.3 ms, also bellow the 3 ms! Excellent!!!

We only need to check what the Chrome FPS Meter says. Oh no! It says that 50% of the frames are being dropped!!! It is like paints one frame and drops the next, paints one frame and drops the next… It is bad!!! And we are not sure if the frame dropping is so regular or it is like paints 1, drops 4, paints 2, drops 1, paints 3, drops 1…

My guess: with our tests written in JavaScript we test the performance INSIDE the V8 runtime. But there is more job outside the V8 runtime, like interact with the video graphics card. This can only be measured with the Chrome PFS Meter. It seems the video card is unable to process everything it receives.

We could imagine an alternative, cheap repainting system for when the avatar is still. But its a bad idea for 2 reasons. First, it does not help when avatar walks (the game must be performant 100% of the time). Second, this system would be very hard to implement due to the intricated overlapping of the volume elements (creatures, walls, speaks, missiles, trees, etc..), mainly the moving ones, each with its own shape and size.

The current version of the Chrome FPS Meter features a very important advance. It tells how many frames are dropped (not printed on screen). And shows the percentage of the recent printed frames over all recent produced frames. The maximum value it shows is 99% even when all the frames are printed.

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ied in June 2015, just days before his 35th birthday, and the unstoppable tragedy forced some of us into rueful reflection about how things could have been different, and many more of us into therapy. Five years later, I’m still not sure how to react.

The terrain list is the large list, containing 10 thousand (100x100) squareObjects. Each squareObject tells everything about the square of the terrain that it represents, including the creature and the missiles that may be over it.

When the avatar walks, his whole environment must be displaced on canvas (since he is always painted in center of canvas). Therefore we must repaint the whole canvas every loop. This is an expensive operation.

The creatures list and the missiles list are small. And are used only for efficiency. Every loop, creatures and missiles must be updated. It is more efficient iterate over the 2 small lists than iterate over a 10 thousand object list.

So why dropping exactly 50%? Another guess: Chrome realizes it can’t keep running at 60 FPS. So instead of trying it, failing almost all the time, Chrome decides to go directly to 30 FPS, providing a smoother experience.

The purpose of gossip is complex. It gives us validation and new knowledge, but it also helps us build relationships, find protection… and there’s a natural element of social enjoyment as well (Hartung et al. 2018).

The image at the beginning of the article is a good example of the type of game I used as inspiration for the tests. A 2.5D adventure like game, third person view, which the player’s avatar is always positioned at the center of the canvas. The game environment is a labyrinth of 100x100 squares with lakes, creatures, and many trees and many walls.