Forums » Impact Engine » Difference between appMobi and iOSImpact (Specifically directCanvas)

I have a question around what makes appMobi and iOSImpact so different.

I have successfully managed to get my device working flawlessly in iOSImpact and have tried a few examples in appMobi.

My question is: What's the difference?

Do they both work with directCanvas? What exactly is directCanvas when you're comparing them.

I guess it's something on the lines of an OpenGL layer as opposed to a webview layer? I know iOSImpact uses OpenGL as far as I know. Does appMobi use the same?

Any information would be greatly appreciated.

They both do the same thing, accelerate your game on iOS (directCanvas Android is in beta). directCanvas contains a webview also, so it provides you access to the DOM. But both do accelerate your game through OpenGL.

When you build with directCanvas, you can tie into our services to get things like In App Purchasing, ads, push messaging, without having to adapt native x-code. They're all just JS include libraries and JS functions. You'd also have access to all of the native functions of the phone like the camera, accelerometer and geolocation through JS API's.

If you need more explanation, let me know :D

Thanks for the reply Tyler. I gave appMobi a go and I must say what a brilliant interface and I'm loving the compatibility with Impact.

I did find a problem however with the iOS test application. My game was running incredibly sluggish and I don't know why (I get around 60fps using iOSImpact).

Also I couldn't find documentation or tutorials on how to implement touch controls. I was hoping my existing project that works fine with iOSImpact would work, however it didn't.

Perhaps I need to play around with it a bit more to familiarise myself with the way the implementations work.

Yeah, there is a small mind gap you have to get over in the beginning. The reason you're touches aren't working is because there is a webview on top of the javascript that is capturing all of your touches and you aren't pushing them down to DC to execute.

If you're menu system is built in javascript (looking for x and y position of touch to execute new script), then you should only have to add about 4 lines of code (you'd need touch forwarding which I go over in the video below).

As for the speed issue, it sounds like that may be a result of not implementing DC correctly and having the javascript still running on the webview. Here is a step by step video I made about a month ago that walks you through how to convert a impact game to DC.

You can watch the video here

And download the conversion template here

Hopefully that'll clear it up for you. If not then you can post on forums.appmobi.com and post under directCanvas with any bugs you're having and I can try to help debug from there.

Tyler do the built in sound methods work on iOS When building with
AppMobi? I believe they won't work when running directly in safari but I was hoping you guys had figured that bit out.

I don't believe they do. In Boom Town we made a switch that used Impact's sound lib on desktop and if on mobile AppMobi.player.playsound();

So if targeting just mobile, look at our sound API to implement audio.

Thanks for the detailed information Tyler, I will give appMobi another shot. To be honest though, iOSImpact seems to allow me to do everything I want to do at the moment without any issues.

I am interested in implementing achievements into my game, so if appMobi can offer that out of the box and the documentation is good enough. I'll consider learning a bit more about it.

Tyler, i think the download link is broken. Could you please re-upload? or is there any new way to do this? Thanks.

Hey eristemena,

Sorry about that. There's a lot of dead links since the switch that we still need to fix. Thanks for pointing this out. I've updated the bundle a little to add some things like hide the status bar and other misc fixes.

DC conversion template

Conversion video

Sorry to see what Intel have done to things. Docs are spread out over multiple domain names, parts of the build system are out of date or misleading (and again over multiple domain names which seem to do the same things, but don't quite), the performance of directcanvas isn't much more than native canvas on modern devices (nexus 4, for example), and scaling it looks awful.

Oh, and your link to the conversion template doesn't work either.