Appodeal Adapters A + iOS + Metal = Black screen

Markus_Ranner · October 27, 2020, 4:32pm

Hi @agramonte. I just tried to build my game for iOS using the 14.1 Metal BETA SDK. Build succeeds, but when I install on device the screen just goes all black after the launch screen. I can hear the music and sound effects, so the game is running but nothing shows up on the display.

I’ve been excluding one thing at a time from my code and build settings to find out what causes it, and it turned out to be the Adapters A plugin. If I just remove that plugin and build again, everything works fine.

In the console I can see the following error which I guess has something to do with it:

ERROR: A shader failed to compile. To see errors, add the following to the top of your main.lua: display.setDefault( 'isShaderCompilerVerbose', true )

Adding the line of code mentioned above doesn’t give me any more clues in the console output.

Anything that you’re already aware of?

EDIT: I’m running the latest versions of “everything”. Xcode 12.1, iOS 14.1, Solar 3622. Also tried installing on an iPad with iOS 13, same problem.

agramonte · October 27, 2020, 7:10pm

If you get a chance can you try it with the old Appodeal plugin?

Markus_Ranner · October 28, 2020, 5:00am

I’ve tried but don’t know how to do that. The old Appodeal plugin doesn’t build at all with the iOS 14 SDK, and if I downgrade Xcode to use iOS 13.7 then I can’t select Metal…

agramonte · October 28, 2020, 2:15pm

I’ll take a look. The A plugin has nothing but ad networks and their adapters. If it fails with trying to render an ad, I suspect that the metal implementation is apparently not compatible with how an ad network is trying to render an ad. Not sure I could do about that other than remove the ad network. But if it is a key ad network for me and since I don’t see any value in using Metal in my games, I will less incline to remove it until I am forced to. But I will see what I can do.

Markus_Ranner · October 28, 2020, 5:18pm

Don’t spend too much of your time on this right now. It’s not that Metal is important for me either at the moment, and I haven’t really considered switching from OpenGL until I really have to. But who knows when Apple decides to drop OpenGL completely… it could be good to be prepared.