Forums » Everything else » appMobi / Impact games

If anyone has a completed Impact game they have ported to mobile with appmobi, we are releasing a new product soon and would love to feature your game inside it.

Email Roys@appmobi.com if you'd like to be featured

Thanks!

What's the new product? it might give me the imputus to finish one of these things!

Unfortunately it's super ultra top-secret, but it's sure to be really awesome!

We want to show some superb games made by you and that are Direct Canvas enabled along with it.

:D

I suppose it depends on how you define superb games?

Also depends on what "complete" means... and when the deadline is. We plan to have a beta release in about a month.

Its a bit different topic but - Appmobi dont work for me I have java installed and I can get to the dash but when I click to open the resource folder nothing ever happens.

Scrap that - It works ok on my laptop - it seems like my work pc is just affected by it.

OH MY GOD! I finally got to use AppMobi to package my first app... It was soooooooooo EASY and streamlined - Absolutely beautiful.... I didn't go further than just dropping my game.min.js and did not optimised it. I was just courious how easy it is to do that. Couldn't be easier.

Depends if you can navigate the "requirements" of Direct Canvas..... From my early experience there is a good deal of work to be done to make something "DC enabled" - not forgetting there is no debug in DC.

Tim.

PS. I've still not got my app working but lots of thanks to your guys for all the help so far.

Well you can always use Impact for iOS. There was a video somewhere of Dominic showing the Biolab Disaster on iPhone.

AppMobi in direct canvas has a note "Note that DirectCanvas provides built-in support for Impact, similar to OSImpact" - I don't know how much they are similar but that's pretty much enough for me.

I really would like to test the Direct Canvas but I already own the Impact so paying another $99 is a bit expensive venture. Come on AppMobi guys do the discounts for Impact owners :) I already love your XDK.

I ran my app through the XDK over the last couple days. It runs great on the emulator, but when I try to test it on either my ipad or iphone, it shows buttons and the rest of the screen is blank.

I fiddled with it for a bit and finally decided that DirectCanvas may be the most wonderful thing in the world, but for me, it's just not worth the hassle. I opened up IOSImpact, and had my app working on it in minutes. I needed one extra bit of functionality not supported, and I'm 99% of the way to adding it.

Ok, I'm not the average target audience of the XDK, as I own a couple Macs and know my way around ObjectiveC fairly well and OpenGL really well already. I think IOSImpact and PhoneGap are more what I currently need.

Good luck with it though, and I hope to see changes that will make it more compelling to me in the future.

Ok, all said, because I think it's very fair, I decided to try out DirectCanvas again tonight to really kick the tires. After all, the first time you use a new tool, you always jump on what it doesn't do how you would do it.

XDK still has an issue with me, on both my devices, of not being testable. It works in the emulators, but when attempting to run it on either device, I got the canvas overlay and that's all. This makes things very difficult to deal with if you run into any real issues and is something that should have been fixed before this went live. It's a miss. Even if others got it working, the fact that I couldn't in two nights just says it's not really ready for prime-time in this regard.

I ran through the build process and it was a nightmare at first. I ended up having to clear out all my certs to get things working properly and starting from scratch. That works for some developers, but can be problematic. They do say they will work with you on that, so I won't hold that against them. I know what technical difficulties they are facing on the back end, and don't envy them those problems. It's as good as it can be.

Once I got the certs cleared and ran through things again, it went beautifully though. I could not have been happier with that part. If you don't have a Mac, or don't want to mess with XCode, it's the best you could hope for. I can highly recommend using this for a JS developer who simply does not have the tools or the chops (or simply doesn't want to be bothered).

When I did get the app saved, I couldn't actually unzip it on my Mac. Odd. I had to move to my windows PC and unzip the thing. Minor inconvenience.

However, the performance is as good as I got in IOSImpact, and almost as good as I managed on the same level coded in Cocos2D (which was a lot more difficult in comparison). I can say that it's ready for prime time in that regard. It does support quite a bit in the way of APIs, and that's a plus.

So, to summarize. I still don't know if I'll personally get the use out of it that I would wish. It depends on how much work I wish to do on my own and what it's worth to me (after all, for what I make an hour, $99 is a no-brainer purchase). I'd be more concerned when/if I found out a limitation in it (which I haven't run into yet). It's bumpy and needs some rouge and lipstick. It also needs a hell of a lot better documentation. As I said on their forums though, coding is easy...documentation is hard.

For about 90% of the folks using Impact, I'd say it's the path you want to go down. When they figure out a discount (I only purchased a single month while they work that out), it will be an absolute must-buy. If they get the Android port working...it will be the top tool for all of us. It's getting there. I'm willing to support them now, even if I won't necessarily be using it for everything, to see where they go with it in the future.

Besides, they are a PA company and only a few hours from me. Buy local and all that.

Great discussions! This will be a long response :)

@MikeL: Superb would be decided really by the person playing it, I should just said completed game they'd like promoted by us with a new product release.

@Graphikos: Completed would mean you're secure with turning it live and allow the general public to play it. The deadline I believe is two weeks unfortunately, but after the release we will still want more games featured!

@Jerczu: I'm glad you like the XDK! Always feels good to hear that. I promise you a discount is very near for impact developers.

@Ashkettle: Very well written article about your experience. I know Cocos2D uses box2d, wondering if you tried DirectBox2D in your app when you were testing it out?

We don't claim to be the only answer, but we do try to make it the easiest, especially for people who simply don't want to bother with Xcode. We are working on a better debug experience for Direct Canvas right now as we know it's frustrating to not have feedback on fails on device.

I appreciate you taking time to write such a in-depth analysis, and thanks for buying local :D

Here are the big issues we've seen with developers trying to port the game over.

We have to separate the UIWebView (AppMobi layer) and DirectCanvas layer into to separate contexts. What this means is your buttons/HTML sit in the AppMobi layer, then the actual game runs in the DirectCanvas layer.

The DirectCanvas layer does NOT have "direct" access to the AppMobi commands, nor common JS commands. It's meant to run only in the graphics layer. AppMobi layer does have functions to send commands to the DirectCanvas layer, so when you press a button, you can send the command through.

Sample problems we've seen have been users trying to make Ajax requests from the game/DirectCanvas layer which is not possible. It is tough because we currently can not provide a good debugging method (we're working on it), but we've tried to highlight the way to separate the apps. When developers follow the guidelines, they run into few issues with the port then...but bugs do happen!

Quote from TylerAppmobi

We don't claim to be the only answer, but we do try to make it the easiest, especially for people who simply don't want to bother with Xcode.

You should add or simply don't work on MAC.

I found appMobi to be the answer not only for my game dev but also webapp development at the company I am working for.

Currently I'm having some issues with packaging the apps for iOS but I think this might be due to the fact that I don't have admin priviledges on my iOS dev account and work as a part of a team so from my account I am unable to generate all the certificates and XDK returns errors I guess due to the mismatch data in different certs. Once I get my own acc I'll try again.

Ok Scrap errors info - I just packaged my app with appMobi :) LOVING IT EVEN MORE NOW!!!

I also started using it last week but was as of yet unable to port my game.(only been at it for a few hours though) but i might know why now.do ajaxrequests prevent the game from loading into the impact xdk?gotta look into that then thanks, sleenee

Ajax requests shouldn't stop the loading of the app in the XDK.

If you are using Direct Canvas you have to make sure you do the ajax request on the web view layer or wrap the command in AppMobi.webview.execute("ajax-request") if it's in the direct canvas layer

Hey all,

I hope someone can shed some light on this,
but currently I'm unable to get my ipad2 to respond to touch via appmobi/impactjs.

It works fine in the emulator, but when I try to get the position of the cursor in my ipad2, it doesn't respond. I thought one could bind touch events on the ipad2?

The biolab demo runs fine on my ipad because it is using html buttons for commands.
I am trying to drag an entity created in impactjs, however, since drag isn't natively support by impactjs, I try to get the position of the cursor, and then iterate through the entity array and look for an entity that is sitting beneath my cursor.

However, like I said earlier, I can't seem to get touch to respond on the ipad.

Can someone help?

Thanks,