Android, what would cause this issue?

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

I’m having a pretty crazy problem with my game. On the iPod Touch it runs flawlessly. On my Samsung Moment running Android 2.1, it runs pretty well. On the Droid, it runs at about what seems to be like 5-10 frames per second and is unusable. It doesn’t play at full speed and then sometimes drop down to that, it’s ALWAYS running at that speed. Does anyone know what could cause this behavior?

I mean the hardware on my Samsung Moment is pretty weak, I don’t think there’s any reason that the Moment should be able to handle it and not the Droid. I think it has to be something I’m missing. The graphics are also really choppy.

Can using zoomStretch at 320x480 possibly be the cause? That’s the only thing I can remotely think of. But my Moment isn’t that exact screen size and no problems there.

Any help is greatly appreciated. [import]uid: 6678 topic_id: 1213 reply_id: 301213[/import]

#2

Did you build for 1.5 or for 2.0? We do know of some performance issues on Android, and we’re working on those. Some apps run fine on some devices, but not on others. I don’t have that particular phone unfortunately. I see the CPU is 800MHz which is not too bad.

Here’s a post that criticizes OpenGL performance on that phone:
http://community.sprint.com/baw/message/182345
But I don’t know how true that is.

Can you describe what your app does in more detail? Does it render a lot of text? [import]uid: 54 topic_id: 1213 reply_id: 3229[/import]

#3

Hi,

I think you might have misunderstood the issue. I know the Samsung Moment is pretty weak, but the game runs fairly well on it. Definitely playable.

The issue is on the Droid, which shocked me. I expected to see iPhone-like performance, but the Droid is the device that seems to be running at 5-10fps. If the Samsung Moment was anything like that I would say maybe the issue is with my code, but it runs superbly on the iPod Touch, and good on the Samsung Moment, and unusable on the Droid.

To elaborate more on what it does, it is a timed platform jumping game. On the iPod touch, in 60 seconds, you can fairly easily jump about 80 platforms. On the Samsung Moment, 50 seems about where it is right now, maybe a little less. On the Droid, I was seeing it at about 10 platforms per 60, maybe even less.

That’s why I really don’t know what to do. I’d rather it be the Moment where it was acting up, but with this happening on the Droid, we can’t release for Android.

The only non-game code that I have running on every enterframe is collectgarbage(“step”), I don’t know if that can be slowing things down that dramatically, and why it wouldn’t also be slowing it down on the Moment and iPod Touch.

But yeah, any ideas at all would be greatly appreciated since I’m pretty stumped.

Edit: To answer your question, the build is 2.0. [import]uid: 6678 topic_id: 1213 reply_id: 3232[/import]

#4

Doh, you’re right. So, a couple people here have droids and they have reported similar issues with our Fishies sample code. So we’ll be able to look at it in detail. [import]uid: 54 topic_id: 1213 reply_id: 3234[/import]

#5

OK, sounds good, if you’d like my code to test to see this issue, just let me know.

Thanks. [import]uid: 6678 topic_id: 1213 reply_id: 3235[/import]

#6

Hey,

Just tested on the Droid again, and you guys must have done something, because WOW, it’s fast! Actually, it might sound weird, but it’s TOO fast. Like I mean significantly faster than the emulator. Maybe just a small slowdown would be good because right now it makes a normal paced game a tad bit too fast.

But either way, great job, and thanks for working on this! [import]uid: 6678 topic_id: 1213 reply_id: 3430[/import]