February 11, 2010
Android Development – Status Report
I’ve spent the last two weeks porting JamJam, IntensiGame and the related projects to Android. It’s been an interesting ride..
On the one hand, Android is a relief coming from J2ME.. :) The development environment is fun. The emulator is usable. Startup time is crazy, of course. But what emulator isn’t? But deployment is fast enough and easy enough. The same is true for using a real device via USB. No problems except some 1.5 SDK woes with Linux. Solved in no time.
You also have some nice APIs to work with. Graphics, sound, IO, especially network IO. It’s all there.
But, on the other hand, you will encounter many dark areas quickly. Up until Android 2.x the whole EGL (the embedded OpenGL) thing is horribly broken in weird little ways. Leaking garbage, interrupting you application every few seconds for a few hundred milliseconds, not supporting proper extensions and at least EGL 1.1. Only EGL 1.0 is a requirement for Android devices. Horrible firmware-/device-specific issues like for example the Samsung Galaxy falling back to software rendering when you tell it to allocate less memory for EGL.
IO seems to be a bit slow. But I’m still investigating if I’m doing something wrong there. Or if there are better APIs or ways to store and retrieve data.
Anyway, I got JamJam running at nearly 30 FPS using EGL/OpenGL or basic canvas graphics without too much tweaking. Acceptable for a first release, I guess. Funny enough I have no problems running the same game (and same code base) at 30-50 FPS on J2ME phones like the more (r/d)ecent Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones.
I have attached a first release of “DroidShock” to this post. I consider this a free demo version of JamJam for Android. I’ll add versions supporting other screen sizes during the next few days. Let me know if you’re interested in helping me out with some alpha/beta testing on your device.
Cheers,
TFDJ
Release with Canvas graphics: DroidShock_DEBUG_CANVAS_320x480
Release with OpenGL graphics: DroidShock_DEBUG_OGL_320x480
Filed by The.French.DJ at 5:28 pm under Android,Development,Games
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