Roku Developer Program

[NanoZim]

"jbrave" wrote:
Wow! Works fast enough on my Roku HD, although for the first 20 seconds it was sluggish.

Interesting. The fake 3D perspective is cheated from a bunch of still images of different areas of the screen, and it sounds like you've cached most of them after about 20 seconds. But on my box (an original model), it never gets out of "sluggish" mode. Do you have one of the newer models? I'm wondering if they either have more RAM, or handle it differently.

Would you be willing to reboot into 4:3 mode, and see how the speed compares?

"jbrave" wrote:
One more thing: have your app load the images off the net, so you don't have to worry about 500k app limit.

I'm not a big fan of doing this. Depending upon how many people play the game, I could find myself either paying for the bandwidth costs myself, or dependent on the reliability of a third-party free hosting site. Keeping everything local is the most permanent, reliable option.

[TheEndless]

"NanoZim" wrote:
I probably can't implement that for this current game, because I'm maxing out my 500kb file limit with the current graphics; there's no way I could include full-HD-res images. But now you've got me really curious about how much of a performance hit the rescaling causes! :? I need to do some tests...

The 500kb limit is a recommendation. The enforced limit is 2mb.

[NanoZim]

"TheEndless" wrote:
The 500kb limit is a recommendation. The enforced limit is 2mb.

Oooh, this I did not know! Thanks!

I assume going greater than 500kb will have some issues, maybe further reducing the number of simultaneously-installed channels?

[Arwen]

"NanoZim" wrote:

"jbrave" wrote:
One more thing: have your app load the images off the net, so you don't have to worry about 500k app limit.

I'm not a big fan of doing this. Depending upon how many people play the game, I could find myself either paying for the bandwidth costs myself, or dependent on the reliability of a third-party free hosting site. Keeping everything local is the most permanent, reliable option.

If 2MB is not enough, perhaps allowing the extra images to be installed on a local server.
Specifically, in the "advanced mode" you could allow lots of extra images and or code to
be downloaded by the user once and put on NAS device or local web server.

That would accomplish several things. First, you only have to supply the original download
and updates. Second, all the bandwidth for the user would be LAN based, (100Mbps
Ethernet or Wifi). Third, no real limit on the size, levels or complexity. That could make
this a very interesting experience.

If you do go this route, I would have 2 modes. The first that's all included so that new
users would have a straight forward install for demonstation purposes.

Anyway, something to think about.

[japzone]

Although I've had no confirmation of this but it seems that Roku has Implemented a fix to the channel limit. One or Two of the Channels on my Roku seem to Load before Launching. This could mean they decided to use the method of Keeping lesser used Channels stored off the Roku until the user decides to use them, the Roku then Downloads the necessary files from the Server. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Just thought this little Info could be of use.

The Channel I keep getting this Loading Thing on is CDNTwo. If you guys also get it only on CDNTwo then I guess something else is Going on.

[RokuKevin]

In v2.8, we have changed the way we load the channels.... Not all the channels need to be loaded at all times, like in prior versions.

However, we are still enforcing a less than 500k warning (and recommendation to keep under this limit to be a good citizen on the box) and a strict less than 2MB limit where we won't even load your channel.

--Kevin

[japzone]

"RokuKevin" wrote:
In v2.8, we have changed the way we load the channels.... Not all the channels need to be loaded at all times, like in prior versions.

However, we are still enforcing a less than 500k warning (and recommendation to keep under this limit to be a good citizen on the box) and a strict less than 2MB limit where we won't even load your channel.

--Kevin

Thanks for the Confirmation 🙂

[Arwen]

"RokuKevin" wrote:
In v2.8, we have changed the way we load the channels.... Not all the channels need to be loaded at all times, like in prior versions.
...
--Kevin

Is their going to be a way to make a channel sticky?

Specifically I would like the local media channels to be
present at all times. Thus if my broadband goes down
I can still play local music, videos and see pictures.

In my case this would be the USB media and Roksbox
channels. But others do exist.

Ideally, to prevent abuse by channel writers, I would
make it so that users would have to go into the
"Settings" page and select which channels to make
sticky.

[RokuKevin]

"sticky" or pre-loaded channels will not be under the developer's control. The box will always be able to download channels that aren't initially loaded at boot time. If your channel becomes one of the user's most used channels it will become one of the pre-loaded channels.

--Kevin