System Puzzles

These puzzles may be used to perform various system functions such as printing to console, measuring performance, getting/setting rendered pixel ratio and retrieving the GPU information.

System visual programming blocks

Contents

Puzzles Reference

print to console

Prints data of any type (an output from some puzzle, a variable, or just a text) to the browser console. Printing to console is the most universal and easy-to-use method to debug your scripts.

Visual logic block to print to the browser console

print performance info

Records a performance profile during 1 second and prints it to the browser console. Use this profile to find performance bottlenecks and improve application rendering and loading speed. See more here.

Visual programming block to retrieve performance info

check performance

Measure rendering capabilities of the user’s computer or device. Under the hood, it uses the open source library Detect GPU to quickly run a benchmark and classify the user’s GPU as “good” or “poor”.

Visual programming block for benchmarking GPUs

You can use this puzzle’s slots to load a simpler scene, or to disable some graphically intensive features (such as post-processing effects) for poor GPUs. On the other hand – if the user’s GPU appears to be powerful – you can boost the quality up.

We also added this benchmark to the WebGL Report page so that you can quickly check your GPU by simply opening this page in the browser.

WebGL system report page

If the user's GPU reported as "good" it does not mean you can overload it by heavy graphics. You still need to do as much as possible to optimize your app!

feature available

Check if a feature selected from the drop-down is available in the user's browser.

Visual logic block to query browser features

get GPU

Outputs the user's GPU info - vendor, for example: NVIDIA Corporation, Apple Inc., Qualcomm, and GPU model, for example: GeForce GTX 1060 3GB/PCIe/SSE2, Apple A9 GPU, Adreno (TM) 330.

Visual programming block to query GPU vendor and model

set screen scale

Set screen resolution factor for the rendered canvas. Set > 1 to improve quality, < 1 to improve performance. 1 is the default screen scale on both retina (aka HiDPI) and non-retina displays.

Visual logic block to set screen scaling

To prevent rendering of too much pixels on retina displays, Verge3D uses 1 as default scale factor. If performance is not a concern, enable retina rendering by setting screen scale to native screen scale.

native screen scale

Native (depends on hardware or browser zooming) canvas resolution factor. If you don't zoom in or zoom out your page, this value equals to 1 for non-retina displays, > 1 for HiDPI displays, modern smartphones and tablets.

Native screen scale visual programming block

detect gamepad device

Detect gamepad devices connected to or disconnected from your system. When a new gamepad device found, the puzzles specified in the "once connected do" slot are triggered. When the device disconnected, the puzzles specified in the "once disconnected do" slot are triggered. In any case the value "gamepad index" is set and returns the device index.

Visual programming block to query gamepads

gamepad index

Returns connected/disconnected gamepad device index.

get gamepad property

Returns a gamepad property for the device with the given index.

Block to get gamepad property

Properties:

To assign axes buttons in your application use the Gamepad Diagnostics tool, debug info property or follow the Standard Gamepad layout (may not work properly for all kinds of devices):

Standard gamepad stick/button layout

In case of standard AR/VR controllers, the layout is different:

Standard AR/VR conroller stick/button layout

storage set

Stores key-value pairs in the web browser's local storage with no expiration time. This means that data stored in the browser will persist even after the browser window is closed. Note: the local storage of web browser in a "private browsing" or "incognito" session is cleared when the last "private" tab is closed.

The key must be a text. The following data types are supported as an assigned value: number, text, list, dictionary.

Block to record data in browser local storage

storage get

Returns an value associated with a specified key in the web browser's local storage.

Visual programming block to access browser local storage

storage remove

Removes an value associated with a specified key in the web browser's local storage.

Visual programming block to remove data from browser local storage

storage check

Checks if a specified key is present in the web browser's local storage. Returns the Boolean-typed result true or false.

Checking local storage with visual programming

close app

Closes the Verge3D application. Due to security limitations imposed by web browsers, this puzzle only works for Electron, Cordova, or programmatically opened pages.

Visual logic block to close the app

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