[WIP] Mini Quests

[dishmoth]

Hi, folks!

This is my first attempt at a game for Android. It's a port of a Java Applet I've been working on. I haven't been able to test it on many devices so far, so whatever feedback you can give me on any problems with the audio, display, application lifecycle, etc. would be very much appreciated.



Play Mini Quests (Android Market)



Mini Quests is a ultra-low resolution, isometric adventure game. Search for the treasure in Zelda-esque dungeons filled with puzzles, monsters, and more puzzles.

Currently there are two dungeons in the game. I'm intending that number to increase over time.

(The applet version of the game is here. But that's got nothing to do with libGDX, so you should probably ignore it. )

Thanks,
Simon

[mzechner]

Really, realy cool. Works well on my nexus one, couldn't find any problems. Will test it on my other devices if i can find the time. Love the art style and the game design!

[dishmoth]

Many thanks for testing!
I've taken the plunge and uploaded the game to Android Market. The link and QR code above are suitably updated.
Cheers,
Simon

[Gnurfos]

On my Galaxy S, the game doesn't run (it just quits after a few seconds of black screen, no "force close").

Is there a way to give you more info ?

[dishmoth]

On my Galaxy S, the game doesn't run (it just quits after a few seconds of black screen, no "force close").

Is there a way to give you more info ?

Uh oh. That doesn't sound good.

I've put a debug build of the game here. If you were to run that, LogCat might give us a clue what the problem is - although I appreciate that that's putting you to a lot of trouble so feel free not to bother.

Either way, thanks for testing!

Simon

[Gnurfos]

As I have a few other games that crash while they should not, I tried the debug version also partly for my sake

I can't find much logs, though (I'm not so used to running logcat on the phone).
The only thing I see is:

Code: Select all

Activity idle timeout for HistoryRecord{40a9f8e8 com.dishmoth.miniquests/.MainAndroid}
Process com.dishmoth.miniquests (pid 11107) has died.


[dishmoth]

Code: Select all

Activity idle timeout for HistoryRecord{40a9f8e8 com.dishmoth.miniquests/.MainAndroid}
Process com.dishmoth.miniquests (pid 11107) has died.


Taking the 'timeout' message on face value (I did a bit of a Google for the message, but I couldn't see an obvious link to what I'm doing) I'm guessing that either something is hanging or just taking too long during start-up.

When I look at LogCat on my phone, the application 'com.dishmoth.miniquests' starts by printing up various messages from dalvikvm, libEGL and AndroidGraphics, then shows a lot of messages from SoundPool (loading up lots of little '.ogg' files) and finally starts showing messages with the tag MiniQuests when the game is ready to run.

I'd be curious to know whether you see any messages with the tag MiniQuests (the first of which is probably "MiniQuests (v2.1.1, 14th February 2012)") or whether the application dies before getting that far.

Perhaps loading up all those sound files is the problem. I'm doing that during ApplicationListener.create() (because I haven't learnt how to use AssetManager yet ). If the phone is terminating the application because create() is taking too long, then I guess that would explain the problem. (I've no idea whether that's a plausible explanation though.) I'll have to do some more reading up on the subject.

Thanks again for testing.
Simon

[Gnurfos]

Here's a result of searching for "miniquests" (I seem to get more results than with just "mini", even if I don't see it as a real tag).

[dishmoth]

Hi, Gnurfos.

That log file looks pretty bad. It seems to go from "Start proc" to "Process has died" with very little in between.

I've uploaded another debug build (same link as before). This time it outputs a log message ("Mini Quests v2.1.1 etc.") as soon as ApplicationListener.create() starts executing. So if that message doesn't appear it means that the game is dying before it's even executed any lines of my code.

(That said, I do have the line

Code: Select all

getWindow().addFlags(WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_KEEP_SCREEN_ON);

in my AndroidApplication.onCreate() function. I wonder if that could be anything to with the problem?)

Just a thought, but how are you searching in the LogCat output? I've very little experience with it myself, but I noticed just now that if you're working with the LogCat window in Eclipse, you have to search for "app:miniquests" to get it to display everything for the application (otherwise it only searches in the message text).

Thanks,
Simon

[Gnurfos]

Here's a log extract for your latest version (full log, no grep this time ... gives much more info).
It seems to be a segfault before reaching your code. Could it be related to my having other libgdx apps with different versions on the device ?