I downloaded makecode kiosk for Xbox the second I knew about it. It was really cool and all. However it lagged. Not a lot on the simple games like Bunny hop and falling duck, even though it is still clearly noticeable. The bigger games like rhombus rush is very hard to play because of the lag. The weird part here is that I know the Xbox has more power than my school ipad. However, the games run a lot smoother on my ipad than on the xbox (I tried playing my super mario remake. I waited two minutes for the game to load), my point here is that the makecode kiosk is NOT using the full power of the Xbox at all. The kiosk needs some optimizitation to say the least. I thought the games was going to run better on a machine with more power. Currently that is Not the case. @moderators I don’t know how much you can do with this. But I would love if you could improve the Makecode kiosk on Xbox. Pretty pleasee
There’s probably a reason for the lag that we don’t know about. @richard might be able to tell us why that is
@Sonicblaston thanks for bringing this up. The Xbox is surprisingly underpowered on the CPU side, and compiling an Arcade game takes a lot of CPU. Not a great combo! But we have an optimization available on Xbox that may not be enabled. If that’s the case, and if we can enable it, project load should speed up a lot. I will check on it tomorrow.
Either way, subsequent project loads should be faster because we cache the built project once we have it. Can you check your super mario remake to see if it loads faster the second time?
Will do, thanks!
Thank you, @makecode, for this great feature for playing MCA games on the XBox, alas and albeit I must admit that it has been a while since I played around with this myself.
The last time I did, however, I also experienced some lagging during gameplay, like @Sonicblaston seemingly is writing about here, but unlike the slow loading / compiling times that @eanders seems to be describing.
On my XBox One, in the new MCA app, all the games i tested loaded and compiled pretty fast, but I experienced the lagging inside the games during gameplay.
The lagging during gameplay had almost the same feel as games being streamed from an external server with some buffering/connection trouble, rather than running locally.
Or could there be some other local processes interrupting the kiosk app/MCA game during gameplay?
I thought the XBox One was powerful enough to run MCA games locally in a local simulator, and I do not remember these laggings during gameplay earlier when I opened MCA in the Edge browser and not in the new MCA app / kiosk?
@Vegz78 as eric mentioned, our app can’t really take advantage of the xbox GPU. the app on xbox is essentially just running in the browser (more info here) and my guess would be that the whole thing is running on the xbox’s not-so-great CPU, though i’m just speculating. i’m not sure if we did much testing with the app on the xbox one… i think most of our testing was done on the series x and s.
one thing i can promise you, however, is that your games are running locally and not streaming from some server!
Thanks for chiming in and especially for reassuring that MCA games in the XBox kiosk app indeed are running locally and not game streamed from some suspicious server!
Thanks also for the tip about the interesting hybrid app approach, Webview(2). That was new to me and piqued my curiosity.
Also congrats to the @MakeCode team for being among the first to launch your MCA Kiosk XBox app on this new technology!
But it still puzzles me that the XBox One, even without the GPU advantage is unable to run the MCA games smoothly on only the CPU, or maybe the puzzle rather is why the Kiosk app is not utilizing the GPU through the hybrid and embedded browser ecosystem in WebView?
I have clear memories about MCA running smoother in the XBox Edge browser (maybe I have to test and compare again), and like @Sonicblaston writes initially, MCA runs like a charm on lots of hardware with many times weaker CPUs than the XBox One.