Looking for someone with a Samsung S7 to do some tests!
Armelline
Member, PRO Posts: 5,354
I've had reports that GameSalad games are displaying incorrectly on the Samsung S7 (and possibly the S8). I'm in need of someone with an S7 to run some tests to try to pin down if this is a GameSalad bug, and if so if there's a way to work around it. Please let me know if you have one and are able to run some tests!
I'm only interested in this particular phone - projects are displaying correctly (aside from one other known bug) on the variety of other Android devices I've tried.
Thanks in advance!
Contact me for custom work - Expert GS developer with 15 years of GS experience - Skype: armelline.support
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I loaded Parcel Monkey onto a friend's S7 (Edge?) - deffo an S7, and looked great, though my game auto-adjusts for resolution and aspect ratio?
I haven't done a splash screen for it yet, so not tested that elephant in the room yet, but the game looked spot on....
The same good friend is sending me his spare (!) S7 this week - long story, he bought it online, scumbag who sold it hadn't kept up payments, barred, but great for testing....
So if you've no joy later this week, I can probably help....
Encouraging that it doesn't sound like a GameSalad bug, then! Just very strange that it works on all other devices it's been tested on! I'll almost certainly take you up on that offer, please drop me a PM when you get the phone if it's not too much trouble!
Contact me for custom work - Expert GS developer with 15 years of GS experience - Skype: armelline.support
Absolutely! - I should hopefully have it by thu/fri, but if not, weekend latest I'd hope! - will shout you once it arrives and I'm ready to test for you!
Excellent, thanks! I managed to take a look at the game's project file and it's using universalising logic that's very old and not what I'd recommend be used now. So hopefully it'll be an easy fix! Just need to be able to test a few versions to confirm what the problem is and test a fix!
Contact me for custom work - Expert GS developer with 15 years of GS experience - Skype: armelline.support
@Armelline - hi matey, got the S7 Edge! (What an awesome mate...
) - Give me a shout / email me the APK, and I'll give it a try for you!
@Armelline
You can go to mobile shops or super market. There are a lot of test devices for testing your app.
Awesome! I've been meaning to get some test projects put together for days, but I've been slacking. Will get them to you asap!
Contact me for custom work - Expert GS developer with 15 years of GS experience - Skype: armelline.support
@Armelline - I tried the Zombie app last night mate - sometimes it seems fine, others there's definitely something going wrong (screen looks zoomed in, text cut off, sometimes stuff looks like it might be on the wrong side of the screen, IIRC - I think it's when I'm rotating the phone ready, once starting loading? - I'll try to use the built-in game recording feature on the phone to get you some footage of what's happening....
Also, this phone has multiple windows mode, not tried your games in that yet, but on Catflap, GS gets confused, and shows up PAST where you'd normally see, with actors spawning, empty screen to the right, etc.... grrr... looks crap.
You might want to be mindful of that too, moving forwards...
Hm... both apps do the same, but this rubbish Android game recording facility only works when it's loaded/loading a game, so I always miss the first bit (splash screen, etc)...
Deffo to do with orientation though - if the phone is in portrait, and I load your Zombie game, it's affected. Likewise, if I have the phone in landscape orientation, and load your jumping game, I get the same issue - honestly wondering if it's more GS issues than your game...
Will upload video for you tomorrow matey... just off to bed as knackered... :frowning: (Looooong day at work... )
@Armelline Okay, I've taken some vids matey. Gonna PM you the links....
Thanks for the vids! This is looking like a GameSalad issue, but might be something we can work around!
Contact me for custom work - Expert GS developer with 15 years of GS experience - Skype: armelline.support
@Armelline - Hi mate, would you bloody believe it, I'm having the SAME problem with my latest game, now that I'm able to test on an S7 edge - also happens on an S8 of a friends...
Did you get any joy from GS, or possibly a workaround matey? - this is incredibly frustrating... :frowning: I have a menu screen that selections HAVE to go in the bottom area (doesn't make sense if not), and they're bloody cropped completely off! (About a quarter of the vertical screen in landscape mode) - PS - holding the phone in different orientations prior to loading makes NO difference as far as I call tell, so probably a different manifestation of your issue...
@adent42 @ForumNinja - if I drop you guys my project, are you able to test on physical or virtual devices please? - it's fairly consistent - 9 out of 10 times I can't see the buttons - removing, re-installing, force-closing etc, all serve to sometimes open it with (still an issue in terms of camera location), but at least the right zoom factor.
The game is completely unaffected on older devices (wife's S6 edge), and iOS, etc, so definitely looking like a bug with GS running on newer Samsungs - possibly related to resolution, the widgets they've introduced, etc - though I've tried game mode to increase the res, and no joy either...
On a side note, in the interests of testing what it would do if users selected it, Samsung's 'windowed' / stacked app mode REALLY breaks the look of games written in GS - On Catflap, I can see double the width, and see actors spawning in off-screen real estate etc, looks really, really crap and unprofessional, so hoping GS can figure a way around it in terms of fixing whatever it's causing the camera to do? - the behaviour might actually even be related to the above issues we're having?
Cheers all...
@Japster Not found a solution yet, but not had time to do extensive testing.
It seems to happen with ALL currently popular stretch methods of universalisation, and appears to be a bug on the GameSalad side of things (or the devices themselves). They appear to incorrectly pass the width/height of the screen.
I suspect a workaround could be implmented by doing a check for which is bigger, and assuming the bigger is width/height (as required) regardless of what is actually reported by the device.
Contact me for custom work - Expert GS developer with 15 years of GS experience - Skype: armelline.support
@Armelline Thanks for coming back mate - I figured out a solution of sorts for my problem, and it might help you out... I'm beginning to now think that it's camera values related (my issue at least - your one, with the mis-placed actors etc, does indeed suggest what you're saying)
I tried all sorts, and loads of settings both in the project and publishing etc, even trying a splash screen etc, but in the end, I seemed to work around it by just waiting for a second or so (for some reason, if I didn't delay it, nothing in my group of behaviours fixed it, so possibly it gets set wrong after loading, and as your scene loads?
Anyway, I digress, but I simply popped an unlocked actor in my scene, that forced a re-initialisation of the camera attributes, to the correct camera values that I have set inside my menu screen scene in Creator, after that delay I mentioned - it seems to work fine, albeit with a tiny delay (which I could fine-tune or hide via a 'blinds' effect, black to 0 alpha), and the screen snaps to the right location and size...
Still sh*t to have to do this, but hey, we're used to patching past bugs by now... :frowning:
Ps - Additional note - I'm using stretch by re-adjusting the camera, once in my game scene (play scene), but my title and menu scene is vanilla in that respect at the moment, so I was confused as to why I was getting this issue! - and of course, I've NOT selected the crappy optional 'universalisation' cropping option within the project... weird....
@Japster Do you guys have trouble with all the scenes ? i only get it on the first scene on s7 edge , and then everything works fine , so i just had to add a loading scene in the beginning.( Im using stretch universal method)
Interestingly enough - yep, agreed - seems to be only the first scene (other than the screwed up android loading image, ho hum...), cheers @Icebox - might give it a try! - However, the little fudge I used seems to work at the mo mate - got my testers on it now, trying to break it!
Well, my fix shows a couple of things - firstly, that whatever kicks in wrong happens as the scene's loading, and I've managed to fudge it (the timing hitting or missing was too flaky), by just firing off the resets for 1/10 of a second intervals, for 1 second - it's crude, but works a treat, especially with a 1/2 second 'blinds' effect (and obviously increasing the blinds size to compensate for the normally out-of-camera area, another fudge, but hey...
Secondly, as I couldn't share the app easily (it was now larger than 25mb), I used TINYPNG for the first time on this project, to compress my images. Well, I can categorically state, I now know for an absolute FACT, that it DOES make a difference (a huge one) to the overall project size guys...
it shrank from 25MB down to 17MB, and yes, this is both reflected in the gameproj size, AND the resulting .APK. Tested on a few devices since, and NO graphical defects whatsoever....
So, if anyone's on the fence 'in case' GS somehow break this PNG compression (compat)ability in a new build, all I can say is that really, I don't expect a new build anytime soon (does anyone?!), so what's to lose if you keep your original gfx 'just' in case?...
I'll be re-visiting some of my other projects now, and gonna be more ambitious with others - I'd recommend guys with other larger 100-300MB+ projects (Demons & Diamonds, was it?) take a long, hard look at this - it's FREE, web-based, and will convert up to 20 files at a time, zip them, and give you one download link to them, on the same page, once done....
I'm 100% sold....
(Incidentally, the '0' items is just a side-effect of trying to do a 'get info' on a folder inside a package, there are about 166 images in there, and I compressed anything bigger than 1kb - as you can clearly see, the resulting files take up a THIRD of the original space, and they're not basic, easily compressible otherwise, images - outstanding!...
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