Is Flash.UI.GameInput not supported in Windows? - air

I'm experimenting with the alleged native controller support of Adobe Air. It seems that Flash.UI.GameInput is the way to go, but when I call:
Flash.UI.GameInput.isSupported
...it always returns false.
Running AIR 3.7, Flashdevelop 4.4.2, Windows 7.

Not in AIR 3.7, no.
However, if you move to AIR 3.8 the first steps of Windows/Desktop support has been added. I can confirm that it works with a Wired (Official) Xbox 360 controller on Windows - although there is a pretty serious caveat in that there appears to be a 1-second, recurring timer setup by the GameInput API.
Even in an incredibly simple application - just using GameInput API - we see a 150ms usage spike on the Timer event that the API sets up... a huge drop from 25fps to 6fps!
It's even more noticeable in a larger project, such as one with Stage3D and running at 60fps, as the drop can hit your frame rate down to the low 30's! This is what I'm seeing on Windows, not necessarily on Android, as the API was originally for.

Update: yes, it now is supported starting in Flash Player 11.8/11.9 and AIR 3.7/3.8. It works the same in AIR and (web) Flash Player.

Related

Glitches when using simple screen recorder on Arch Linux box

So i had been making video tutorials for my friends on how to program. On my old computer i had been all ways running simple screen recorder and it recorded fine. But recently i got a new computer. And so when i got a fresh install of arch linux on the box. I set up the environment with every thing i needed to make another video. When i downloaded simple screen recorder using yaourt, and started recording. I had recorded up to a two hour session with out knowing that it was glitching out. When i look at my computer i do not see the same issue as when the final product is done rendering. I think it might be a rendering error or i do not have the right codecs. After a hour or two searching on the web i could find no forum posts on the codec. I took in multiple things that could be wrong with it fps was my first choice but when i had recorded with 25 and even 50 fps it was still glitching out. The next idea i had was that i had the wrong codec H.264. But with searching i could find no solution to that one. Then i thought that i might have been encoding at to high of a speed (23). But still that proved me wrong. so now i am confused with how to get my answer.
Settings Screen shot:
Video Link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfyIZiJCDa4
The glitches are often relate to the rendering backend of the window compositor you are using.
Solution 1 - Change the rendering backend of the window compositor
#thouliha reported having issues with compton. In my case I had glitches with openGL (2.0 & 3.1) and resolved the issue by switching to XRender for recording.
On KDE you easily change the rendering backend of the window compositor in the settings .
Solution 2 - Change the Tearing Prevention method
To keep using OpenGL, for example for better performance, you can also tweak the tearing prevention method.
In my case switching from Automatic to Never allowed me to record video with OpenGL compositor without glitches.
Solution 3 - Intel iGPU specific issues
Intel iGPU (Intel graphics) has some rendering issues with some CPUs.
You can check the Troubleshooting section of ArchLinux wiki to check those.
Example of features creating tearing or flickering related issues:
SNA
VSYNC
Panel Self Refresh (PSR)
Check also /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf if your system has put tweaks in here.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by glitching out, especially since the video is down now, but I've found that the video is choppy when using compton, so I had to turn that off.

Cocos2dx performance issue on Windows Phone 8

I'm trying to port an android/iOS game to windows phone 8(cocos2dx v 2.2). I'm using the exact same code base that I've used for android and iOS. The game functions just fine, but I facing some major FPS drop. The game runs flawlessly at 60FPS in android and iOS, but I'm getting roughly about 35FPS on wp8. Has this got to do anything with differences in OpenGL and directX?
I doubt its got to do with the game's logic and calculations because when the game starts in windows phone, it starts with 60FPS on the main menu, which has got like 5 sprites. But as I add more sprites on the screen, say about 30 of them(average number of sprites when I'm IN the game) the FPS rapidly drops to 35-40 range. Note that there are no schedulers or update functions running at this point. I did the same test on Android, but the FPS didn't drop. Does the win8 port of cocos2dx suck?
Any help,comments or redirection to useful articles would be appreciated.
Thank you.
In case anyone runs into similar issue, I reduced the number of children in the scene and deployed the build in release mode. Gave a major boost to the FPS. Also, I had a bunch of float to string and int to string conversions happening in every frame inside the update function. That was eating away on the processing speed too.
Actually, the Cocos2dx port for WP8 is ok, but outdated. Cocos2d-x is now at 3.0 beta, but the WP8 was left at 2.0 alpha.
Anyway... in Cocos there are some recursive drawing functions which are very heavy on the CPU, and also, keep in mind that even though WP8 is supposed tu support arrays, lists, maps etc. they are very slow on WP8.
And since you came to this subject, Please let me know if you managed to successfully put cocos2d-x on an XAML+D3D Interop project. I am getting tons of crashes.
EDIT: Indeed, the recursive calls which process (draw or update) child "CCNode"s are very heavy on the device. However, after putting Cocos2d-x ver. 2.0alpha for WP8 into a XAML+D3D interop project, I found a whole lot of memory related issues. Apparently, after doing this (or just because I don't know how to properly configure my VS project and allow loose addressing), a lot of uninitialized pointers and data cause some memory overlaps, leading to major crashes.
This proves only that it was truely an alpha release :) Too bad no newer version of Cocos2d-x for Wp8 is available.

Color and depth stream don't work anymore

I used until yesterday afternoon a Kinect for XBOX 360 on my computer, a MacBook Pro 15" Late 2011, whose specifications are available here. I use Windows 7 (natively installed, without using virtual machines). The version of the SDK I had installed was 1.0.
All of a sudden, from today the Kinect no longer worked. Initially I thought it was some error in my code, but I noticed that the program remained stuck at the beginning, when I called the method KinectSensor.Start().
I started looking for information on the internet. I read about a solution obtained by reinstalling the drivers. It did not work, and then I tried to install version 1.6 of the SDK. Unfortunately, even that did not work.
I've seen at this stage, there might be compatibility issues with certain USB host controllers, such as the Intel 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB host controller. In my case, however, there should be no problems (because there were not ever been up to yesterday):
To check if the problem was really due to the sensor, and not to my application, I run one of the test applications provided with the SDK, called Kinect Explorer. However, I encountered the same problem with this test application. After waiting about one minute, when the Kinect Explorer starts I cannot see neither the color stream, nor the depth stream, nor information about skeleton. The only thing I can do is move the Kinect up and down, changing the angle of the neck. Even the microphone array seems to work properly.
I read two interesting posts about this kind of problem: this and this, which have not been answered.
In the first of these two links, the user who reports the problem says that the hardware has been compromised. I thought the same thing myself until I started again Kinect Explore, initially with the sensor unplugged. Once started this program, I plug-in the cable, and I noticed that Kinect Explorer has marked the Kinect sensor as Connected. After a short initialization phase, I again see the color stream, while the depth stream showed an image of uniform color (green-gray):
This situation lasted a few seconds, after which the image is locked and the question came up. Also, sometimes the FPS value drops from 30 to 29.
I am able to reproduce this latter situation only after keeping the Kinect unplugged for a while (10 minutes are sufficient).
How can I solve this strange and terrible problem? Is it possible to restore the Kinect sensor, and make it works again? Or do I have to conclude that the sensor is irretrievably broken?

Kinect hangs up suddenly after working pretty well a few seconds. How can I fix it?

I tried using "Kinect for Windows" on my Mac. Environment set-up seems to have gone well, but something seems being wrong. When I start some samples such as
OpenNI-Bin-Dev-MacOSX-v1.5.4.0/Samples/Bin/x64-Release/Sample-NiSimpleViewer
or others, the sample application start and seems working quite well at the beginning but after a few seconds (10 to 20 seconds), the move seen in screen of the application halts and never work again. It seems that the application get to be unable to fetch data from Kinect from certain point where some seconds passed.
I don't know whether the libraries or their dependency, or Kinect's hardware itself is going wrong (as for hardware, invisibly broken or something), and I really want to know how to detect which is it.
Could anybody tell me how can I fix the issue please?
My environment is shown below:
Mac OS X v10.7.4 (MacBook Air, core i5 1.6Ghz, 4GB of memory)
Xcode 4.4.1
Kinect for Windows
OpenNI-Bin-Dev-MacOSX-v1.5.4.0
Sensor-Bin-MacOSX-v5.1.2.1
I followed instruction here about libusb: http://openkinect.org/wiki/Getting_Started#Homebrew
and when I try using libfreenect(I know it's separate from OpenNI+SensorKinect), its sample applications say "Number of devices found: 0", which makes no sense to me since I certainly connected my Kinect to MBA...)
Unless you're booting to Windows forget about Kinect for Windows.
Regarding libfreenect and OpenNI in most cases you'll use one or the other, so think of what functionalities you need.
If it's basic RGB+Depth image (and possibly motor and accelerometer ) access libfreenect is your choice.
If you need RGB+Depth image and skeleton tracking and (hand) gestures (but no motor, accelerometer access) use OpenNI. Note that if you use the unstable(dev) versions, you should use Avin's SensorKinect Driver.
Easiest thing to do a nice clean install of OpenNI.
Also, if it helps, you can a creative coding framework like Processing or OpenFrameworks.
For Processing I recommend SimpleOpenNI
For OpenFrameworks you can use ofxKinect which ties to libfreenect or ofxOpenNI. Download the OpenFrameworks packaged on the FutureTheatre Kinect Workshop wiki as it includes both addons and some really nice examples.
When you are connecting the Kinect device to the machine, have you provided external power to it? The device will appear connected to a computer by USB only power but will not be able to tranfer data as it needs the external power supply.
Also what Kinect sensor are you using? If it is a new Kinect device (designed for Windows) they may have a different device signature which may cause the OpenNI drivers to play-up. I'm not a 100% on this one, but I've only ever tried OpenNI with an XBox 360 sensor.

OSX Lion and Movist: playback freezes at specific instant

I'm a newbie developer who worked on Movist media player over the last months.
The project seems to be dead so I started to look at the code and try to understand how it behaves.
I have been able to add hardware decoding (with VDADecoder), fix all deprecated functions, plus other minor things and everything seems to work nicely on Snow Leopard.
When testing the app on OSX Lion, instead, I encounter a very annoying issue and I'm short of idea because I tried quite everything..
The video playback freezes for about 0.1 - 0.2 seconds always at the same instant during the playback. It seems to freeze just when the decoder reaches the end of file and when the remaining (already) decoded frames get displayed.
The issue appears with both hardware and software decoding and it's not related to the part of code that I have added.
Obviously, the same movie file plays smoothly on Snow Leopard (with both software and hardware decoding) and on Leopard (with software decoding) (hardware decoding isn't supported).
I tried to use Instruments to debug this issue but I don't know how to catch that instant. Sometimes Instruments records a lot of "sys enter trap" around that instant..is this a hint?
I tried to rebuild the project with Xcode 4 and SDK 10.7 and to fix all the warnings but the issue still persists.
Is there a way to debug this issue?
I don't know how to discover the bug...if there is any..
I hope you can help me.
Regards
Andrea
Just to let everyone know, I found what was causing the issue.
It was given by the Restorable feature of the movie window which was causing that periodical stuttering.