WebGL now faster than Flash?

During the last weeks, quite a few people using CopperCube are reporting that they are discovering surprising performance testing results: It appears that for them, the WebGL renderer is faster than the one using Flash and Stage 3D.
Personally, I wasn't able to reproduce these results myself, although I must say that browser developers have improved the JavaScript performance very much recently, especially in Chrome and Firefox. Also, it sounds a bit strange, because Flash is statically compiled down to bytecode, while JavaScript is still very dynamic, and the WebGL 3D engine behind CopperCube, namely CopperLicht uses some of the dynamic features, for example for storing allocated render buffers, WebGLFloatArrays (or Float32Array as they are called now), and similar.

It could be that those CopperCube users reporting that WebGL is now faster for them than Flash are maybe running some throttled flash player (maybe the debug version?) or similar, but it's stange that this is happening now at the same time and that there are quite a few of them. Anyway, it would be nice if you could drop me a line or post a comment if you are having a similar experience.

Upcoming productivity hole

What? Diablo 3 will be out next week? Oh boy. There goes my free time.... Also, did you see my last blog entry? Not sure what happened there, but those 130 comments are real ones, not spam. Hm... :)

Want good programmers? Then PAY them.

Just read an article in a local Austrian newspaper, telling that local companies are unable to find good developers and programmers. There are currently 22% more open job positions in this area compared to last year, and even back then lots of positions were not be able to be filled. I'm not surprised at all.

The problem IMO is that companies are not willing to pay enough for developers and programmers. In Austria, an entry level programmer with high level university training will usually get offered 2200 Euro gross. I'm not kidding. Wake up, people: Are you serious? You want highly specialized people with actual skills, and expect them to be OK with that comparable low payment? If the same person sits down and starts creating his own software, he will probably earn much more one year later by himself already. Why on fucking earth should he start as programmer probably even without prospect of a promotion in your company then? Why should he even consider to work as programmer? He would be better off working as team manager, project lead or similar, blabbering in meetings with all the other people, not doing actual work. But at least he would be paid there probably even twice as good.

I've heard the situation is similar in other countries, although I don't think programmers are seen comparable worthless in many other countries :)

Minor version update

Just upgraded a 3rd party library I use in one of my projects. It's just a minor version update. Great. If that library wouldn't be that useful and fast, I would directly kick it out. Because replacing it with another one would probably be the same amount of work as fixing all those errors.

Space Mining == Picture Apps

As a lot of people, I'm quite excited about Planetary Resources, Inc, the just announced company backed by lots of rich people like the Google Founders and that famous movie maker. They want to mine asteroids, which sounds great and is finally a reason to go deeper into space again. Finally, a bit of hope for humanity. :)
They say they need 2.6 billion dollars for this, which sounds like quite a lot. But if you remember: the purchase of Instagram, a tiny picture sharing app, recently cost one billion dollars. Don't we have our priorities a bit wrong today? At least, after I wrote this, I saw a comment on reddit with the exact same thought. :)

Koki's Adventure

Apparently, I'm about half a year late, but I only now saw this video of an adventure game created with CopperCube:


That's quite impressive. Must have been a lot of work creating this. Also, I like how it uses the dynamic light feature extensively, most CopperCube projects I saw used static lighting.

Ironic

As you may know, I created and am selling an Actionscript Obfuscator named irrFuscator, which is useful for protecting your created Flash applications. For example if you created a game. And it seems to be quite useful to some people. It helps preventing people from copying and stealing your work.

What I find quite ironic is that there are actually people trying to get a pirated copy of irrFuscator. Really. Stealing some developers (=mine) work in order to prevent your own work to be stolen? Double-Standards anyone? :)
It's nice to hear at least that those 'cracks' available for my software actually seem to be trojans, installing pretty evil stuff on the users system. I really don't feel any pity for those people :)

Wasted Development Time

I hate those situations in which you sit down for a few weeks and implement a highly complex algorithm you made up yourself for solving a specific problem. Finally, happy that you finished it and it does what it is supposed to do, you notice that it doesn't work in all cases you have thought of, and that all your work was senseless. But instead of deleting all the code and starting from scratch, you try to fix those few edge cases with evil, evil hacks, but instead of getting better, the problem gets even more bad. That's what just happened to me. Argl. I guess I have to start over again. Sometimes, programming really sucks. :/

Postmortem of my Android Game App

As I blogged before, I programmed a little Android game and published it at Google Play, or the Android Market, which it was called still then. I wanted to see if and how you could make money of Android Game apps. Two months have been gone now since the game has been released, and I think it's time now to draw a conclusion:

I think the project can be classified as commercial failure. It has made a turnover of astonishing 16 euro so far. :) As written previously in detail, the game has been rated very nicely, and people seem to have liked it. A few websites reviewed the game as well positively, and the 'Lite' edition of the game I made was downloaded a few hundred times in the few weeks it existed. But still, sales of the full - 'HD' - version remained low, unfortunately. So a few weeks ago, after 2 months I decided to make the game free: at least people should have fun with it. This caused a tiny boost in downloads, and quite a bit users are now playing the game. You can get it here.

My personal conclusion from all this is pretty much the same as I read from other people on the web before I started this project: It's difficult to make money on the Android Market / Google Play with normal, sold apps. People using Android phones appear to expect free stuff, even if it comes cobbled with annoying ads or spyware.

At least, Google Play provides you with some detailed statistics of your apps. With a bit more than 2000 currently active game installs, I think those values might be interesting:

• My game is mostly installed on Android Devices with the version 2.3.3. Those make 63% percent of all installs.
• The latest Android Version 4 currently only is being used by 0.5% of all people playing my game. Ice cream Sandwich apparently still has a long way to go.
• The most used device is the Samsung Galaxy, no surprise there.
• The most used sub-version of the Samsung Galaxy Brand is the Samsung Galaxy Y with 8% of all users. I'm not sure if this device is really that popular, or maybe it's because also my main test device was a Samsung Galaxy Y, and the game runs nicest on that one.

So I'll probably not continuing to develop Android Games, and keep creating and improving real software. :) But it was an interesting experience, and also if it has flaws: Google really created a nice OS with an excellent development environment for it. For creating fun and hobby projects, I can really recommend Android as software development target platform.

Fighting Spam

Sorry for the current lack of updates. Some bots are currently attacking this blog with lot of spam and other evil things. I hope it's now a bit hardened, but let's see.