pixijs or createjs is better for mobile/phonegap game

[kstamatov85]

Hello guys, I'm new in the game development and don't know which canvas framework to choose for my game.

Both pixijs and createjs looks great, but I'm not so sure which lib will work better for me, so to start investing time

learning it. My plan is to use Phonegap as wrapper and I'm targeting Android devices only.

Also all the screens/views in my app are organized with angular js,

so the game screen will be the only view where canvas will run.

What do you think and what will you advise me to use?

Thanks a lot!

[sbat]

createjs is good. I've successfully used it to build all my games, and will continue to do so. Its main advantages are similarity to Adobe Flash AS3 object model. Flash also does its html5 content export with createjs. 

 

However, if I were starting today, I'd seriously consider pixi:

- It seems it decently supports WebGL for a while (still beta in createjs)

- Some of its assumptions are (out of box) more performant for normal canvas. For example, createjs tends to do saveContext/restoreContext for every display object, which affects performance on older devices. It is not particularly hard to write your own createjs container, which does not support object tree with arbitrary transformation and avoid save/restore. But out of box Pixi, it seems, can be faster.

- Some of the phaser/pixi features are just more mature (like bitmap font support is better there). 

- Pixi community seems to be more lively and geared toward game development (especially if you add Phaser on top of it). 

 

However, best piece of advice I can give: DON'T use HTML5 in general and phonegap in particular for building Android apps from scratch. Unless this is for some sort of competition, or educational project, or a game less demanding than 2048.

 

For web apps playing in mobile browser HTML5 is the only choice, and I am big proponent here. But for native apps it is really a poor choice (unless your are building native app as a side project of mobile or desktop web app). With Unity, or Adobe Air, or native route, you'll find much less nasty surprises. For example, with phone gap you'll likely find performance issues and hiccups on Android 2.3.x (and even earlier 4.x). You'll likely be struggling with audio (experimenting with various low-latency audio plugins). You'll have no access to GPU on some older (but powerful) devices, and on newer devices you'll not have control over very basic things like texture loading. 

[kstamatov85]

Thanks for the answer!

I know that kind of wrappers are not really cool for game dev, but the game that I intend to develop is a simple one and will not need a lot of hardware resources.

Because of phonegap speed remarks that you made I think that can use cocoon js or some other wrapper. I read nice thinngs about  cocoon and find it a lot better from phonegap and

more sutable for my purposes..

Since your advices I think to start with pixi, it really looks faster.

I even test example on mobile chrome browser and the performance was good.

 

 

Please if anyone have experience with creating html5 games with pixi/createjs for mobile with some specific wrapper - cocoon, phonegap etc. to share his experience!

Gues that will be helpfull for many peoples!

Thanks a lot!