Speaking of poor animation in Ensemble...
Is anyone able to run Brick Breaker without choppy animation or poor framerate performance on the ball?
Now, I suspect the issue there is in the balls animation implementation in the
application rather than the JavaFX framework, as the bat moves smoothly when I
move the mouse, but the overall perception of JavaFX performance for this demo
app is not good. I would go so far as to say that Brick Breaker has had the
opposite effect it was intended too - simply because the animation of the ball
is not smooth. That's something that would run smoothly on a Commodore 64,yet
the last time I tried it (5 minutes ago) with JavaFX 8.0-b91 on a quad-core
3GHz Windows 7 box with a decent NVIDIA card, it didn't run as smoothly as I
would expect. Just a single ball with a shadow bouncing around the screen
seemed to have a low framerate and the occasional skipped frame. It just
didn't look that great.
The fact that Brick Breaker ships as a sample app from Oracle and it's
animation looks bad is harming JavaFX's reputation in my opinion. I think it
could run much better on the existing JavaFX runtime. The simple animations in
the Ensemble app run much smoother for example.
Scott
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 11:11 AM, Richard Bair <richard.b...@oracle.com> wrote:
Then you mention Halo 5. I have to say the subtext here troubles me
greatly. If I read you correctly then you are saying that JavaFX is not
really suitable for games (at least anything beyond the demands of something
like Solitaire). As someone else pointed out, what is point of developing
3D support in JavaFX if it is not really suitable for games? To say it is
not suitable for games implies that it is not really suitable for *any*
application that requires performant animations and visualisations. What
use then is the 3D API?
That's not fair at all. There are a *lot* of enterprise use cases for 3D, and
we get these requests all the time. Whether we're taking about 3D
visualizations for medical or engineering applications or consumer applications
(product display, etc), there is a requirement for 3D that are broader than
real time first person shooters.
Game engines often have very specialized scene graphs (sometimes several of
them) as well as very specialized tricks for getting the most out of their
graphics cards. When we expose API that allows people to hammer the card
directly, then it would be possible for somebody to build some of the UI in FX
and let their game engine be hand written (in Unity or JOGL or whatever).
However, I am not sure that having me preparing "reproducible" test cases
will actually help. In my experience, the Ensemble app already serves this
purpose. The choppiness I describe is *always* prevalent when I run the
animations and transitions in Ensemble (including Ensemble 8). The only
variation is in the degree of that choppiness.
Then start with that, something absolutely dead simple like a path animation or
rotate transition and lets figure out how to measure the jitter and get it into
our benchmark suite.
Richard
