How to Update NW.js to Dramatically improve Game Performance!

nwjs.io website is working fine - are you getting it from there?

NW.js v0.49.2 Released with Node.js v15.0.1

Yes, but the one you provided worked, but the download did the same thing.
So, I switched to Firefox and it works now? I normally use Edge but switch to Firefox for some things, so it was somehow on my end the entire time, something to do with Edge I suppose.
Ok, I tried doing it with a VPN active and it downloaded everything just fine.

You should be using the latest Linux version, rather than windows in proton
The native version will run faster (though not fast enough, still trying to find a better solution than nwjs for steam deck, since tauri isn't supported there)

Btw to avoid double posting if you (reader of this thread), like me, need more speed than what nwjs has to offer its pretty easy to port your game to tauri which uses webkit2 for browser rendering and should give significant performance gains.

Check it out here
Tauri 2.0
Maybe I'll make a different thread with some rmmv specific porting instructions but I've sort if held off on it until I have a solution for steamdeck

That would be awesome, cutting back the hundreds of mb of nwjs to apparently around 3mb seems like it would really help with smaller games.

Check this more detailed guide mayhaps?

Everything works now, it was on the server side, and I just came at a bad time.

Would be nice to see a different output possibility for RM. It says that Tauri is cross-platform - is the SteamDeck not compatible or are there performance issues?

Anyways, looking forward to it. I may upgrade to the latest NWJS for now just to test it on different platforms. I'm liking v0.77 for the M1/Silicon right now and it works great (deployed from Windows 10).

So there's no reason why the steam deck shouldn't be compatible but unfortunately the package that provides webkit2 for arch that Valve has in their repository is rather outdated and has an issue with displaying a webgl canvas. To avoid this I've tried compiling as a flatpak in an ubuntu vm instead, which does display correctly, however the flatpak support in tauri is early and it actually ends up being much slower due to the additional overhead. This does mean that there's a few avenues to resolving the issue, either valve could upgrade the correct packages, tauri could improve flatpak support, or provide cross compile support with targeted dependency bundling which is actually something they have on their roadmap.

Hello ! First of all, thanks for the guide. I tried updating my NW.js, I did it multiple times because when I do, I keep on getting the error FILE_NOT_FOUND when launching the game. Is there a way to fix this ?

You put the file that it's looking for.

No one can give any better help unless you show a screenshot of the error (press F8 and go to the Console tab).

But "file not found" is pretty self-explanatory. It tells you what directory it's looking in and what file name it's expecting to find.

(not sure how to remove comment here) Mistakenly thought i had issues from applying this "update" but it seems to be an entirely different pre-present issue.

required value 'name' is missing or invalid

Thanks for the tip! I'll stick to 0.69 then

For the steam deck, I would recommend not using the windows version, and instead making a dedicated linux port, I've tested NWJS 49.2( linux version ), on an MZ game, and it works perfectly on steam deck( and my laptop, which also uses linux ), imo, there's a lot of inconsistencies with just relying on proton for porting an MV/MZ game to linux. I.E. some weird graphical glitches upon soft reset, frequent stutters, and more frequent crashes, as least from my testing.

Also porting the game to native linux/mac is really not that hard at all. It's definitely worth the small amount of effort imo ^^; All you gotta do is replace all the NWJS files from the project with the linux ones nad it'll be a native linux version. The ONLY thing you'll need to worry abiout is the consistency of your file names when porting to mac/linux( unless your doing some really abstract Node or NWJS specific calls in yoiur game, which is very highly unlikely ).

For example.. In windows If you have a file called "Hero_01.png" but some plugin is hard coded to accept the file "hero_01.png", windows will have no problem finding the file correctly, but linux and mac are case sensetive file systems! Which means that... because the plugin is looking for "hero_01.png"( all lower case ) but the file is actually named "Hero_01.png"( the first letter is capitalized ), linux and mac will NOT be able to find the file, so you'll end up with an error telling you that the specific image is missing, all it would take to resolve this issue, is change the file name from "Hero_01.png" => "hero_01.png", and do the same for any hard coded file names. It works like this for ALL files, and folders in linux, any file or folder, the spelling MUST be exact!

However in most plugins, it's not common to hard code images, or audio names, so in most cases, these type of occurences would probably not ever really occur, so in most cases it's just a matter of replacing the NWJS files.

Sorry for the rant ^^; but as a native linux user and a steam deck owner, I thought this advice would hopefully help others who plan to add support for linux/steam deck, as it's FAR easier than one would think, even for MZ which doesn't have a native linux export option like MV does.

I just tried this with NS version 0.86 and Pixi version 4.8.9, and I'm getting the error "required value 'name' is missing or invalid". I don't know which, if either, is causing the issue

To fix this, go into your project folder and open the package.json with a text editor. Put something in the "name":"putyourgamenamehere" slot and save it. The game should launch fine after that.

Uh, what's the guide for RPGMMZ? I'm using the Steam version and see no test folder in there?

@Nectar I don't use MZ so cannot confirm things for you, though I suspect it's the same as MV and therefore you may have not followed the instructions correctly. Double check you are in the right place, and follow the instructions exactly as they are written.

However, I wanted to provide some food for thought; MZ comes with a much higher version of NWJS than MV, and likewise, the performance gains in MZ are far lesser than the performance gains in MV. In my personal opinion, it is not worth the possibility of breaking plugin behavior for only a marginal, and likely unnoticeable improvement in performance.

Best of luck, I hope you find your answer.

MZ users can use the ideas presented in this guide to update their NW.js from 44 to 50 if they like, but I'm not sure how much of a performance update this will be. (To update MV from 29 to 50 (or in my case 49.2) is a massive update!) It's actually easier to update MZ since the engine folders are structured much better. Just find the "Resource" folder, and replace the proper NW.js folder with the new downloaded versions and it should work just like that. Of course, I advise making backups, etc. (do NOT rename nw.exe to Game.exe) Have fun!

What resource folder? None of the two I found has an existing NW.js file in it. I'm referring to the installation folder.


Edit: I got it to work; it fixed the annoying glitch where text would break and bug.