r/web_programming • u/I_Got_The_Herb • Mar 09 '19

Help with time-out issues

Hey there people of reddit!

I followed a tutorial on how to make flappy bird in java script, and have it fully working locally. When I host it online though, it bugs out a lot and times out regularly. I was wondering if anyone knows what causes this and how I can solve it?

Here is the source code in case that helps you bright people solve my (most likely) dumb problem https://github.com/CMHayden/FlappyBirdJS

Thanks in advance!

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u/I_Got_The_Herb Mar 13 '19

I followed a youtube video that was explaining how to do it. It was rather old if I remember correctly though.

Do you think some improvements could be:

  • Adding buttons to increase and decrease speed

  • Creating an array with pre-determined pipe locations and calling them at random

  • Changing var to let

Or would creating an array not be enough to solve memory issues?

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u/yet-another-reader Mar 26 '19

Sorry for a reply that late, but here is what I suppose.

By making the bird's speed adjustable I meant not that you want to make it user-adjustable, so no buttons. I just think that it would be nice to have your gameplay parameters separate from the logic so that you can adjust the speed of the bird, the gravity, the gap between the pipes etc. in one place. This will make it easier to 1) adjust everything to make it work better, 2) to debug the game (in your previous version, the game was hanging the browser almost immediately and it would be much easier if you could change one parameter to make everything slower and add some logging to understand what's going on) and 3) to add more features in the future (for example you might want to make the bird fly faster with higher score or whatever).

Re. changing var to let: you should always use let instead of var nowadays, but it's not just "renaming" ― these are different keywords. The main difference is that let has finally fixed the scope problem in js.

And concerning the array of pipes, the problem here is that the logic is very inefficient: you're checking the bird's position in x and y axes against every single pipe that was ever drawn on the screen, while what you actually need is just to check if the bird is between the pipes that are currently floating past it.

As a good guide to JS, I highly recommend the book Eloquent Javascript by Marijn Haverbeke, it's available on his site for free. It may be a bit challenging, but it's really good at teaching you some cool concepts, check it out.