existing games and new build plus image formats

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

Hi y’all,

It’s been a while since I posted but am ready to get back in the game again :slight_smile:

anyways, I just got the new build (2076) and all my original taptards from 2 years ago no longer work and get a bunch of errors on original libraries (such as ice, beebe, director, etc).

also, I’m no longer aware on where it all stands to build for iphone 5 or ipad air dimensions if I want to do universal builds.

for example, I currently have a universal build background at 512x512 iphone and 1024x1024 ipad, but I think the iphone 5 is 1136x640 and ipad now is 2048x2048?

how should I modified my code/images to properly build for universal?

any help would be appreciated.

thanks,

-rd

#2

Hi @rdcube.

If you’ve been out for a couple of years, quite a bit has changed.  Public build 2076 is the first build with our news Graphics engine, and there are things that changed that pretty much will cause problems with previous 3rd party libraries until they update themselves.  Many of the libraries you listed haven’t been updated in over a year and some of those developers are no longer active.

You can add this line to your config.lua:

graphicsCompatiblity = 1

in the same place where you set the width and height for your device and it will make most of the changes with the Graphics engine behave like the old Graphics 1.0 engine.  It’s not perfect and you may have to modify those libraries as necessary.  

Now to catch you up to speed on your devices.   There are not too many iPhone 3’s out there still which were 320x480.  The iPhone 4 family doubled that resolution to 640x960.  The iPhone 5 family keeps the 640 wide but is now 1136px tall.    The iPad 1, 2, and mini are 768 x 1024 in size, while the iPad 3, 4, Air and Retina Mini are 1536 x 2048 in size.

So how do you support a universal build on that?  Read these two posts in order.  The 2nd one depend on the first one:

http://www.coronalabs.com/blog/2012/12/04/the-ultimate-config-lua-file/

http://www.coronalabs.com/blog/2013/09/10/modernizing-the-config-lua/

By the time you are done with the second one,  you will be able to build a config.lua file that will properly size any screen and select a set of images appropriate for the screen in question.   It should be noted, that the second post makes a recommendation that moves away from the old 320x480 base screen size to something more modern.  For your old apps, or if you plan to use pickerView widgets or some ad functions, it may be best to stay with the 320x480 content area rather than adopting the  800x1200 area recommended.  Moving forward with new apps, if you don’t need a pickerView, the larger area makes sense given modern hardware.

There is one other very important gotcha.  When Apple came out with the iPhone 5, they used a hack to get the operating system to determine if its a “tall” app (4" 1136px) vs a normal app (3.5" 960px high).  You must have a file named exactly:

Default-568h@2x.png

in the folder with your main.lua.  This file must be 640px wide and 1136px high portrait orientation only.  The name is case sensitive.  If this file is not present, iOS will assume your apps is for a 3.5" iPhone 4 device and not give you the extra pixels.  More importantly, Apple is now rejecting apps that don’t use the full height of the iPhone 5 family.  So this is an absolute must.

Apple also created challenges for app developers with iOS 7.  There are a whole bunch of things you need to be aware of when creating iOS 7 apps.  We summarized that here:

http://www.coronalabs.com/blog/2013/09/17/tutorial-getting-started-with-ios-7/

It should be noted that as of now, The iOS 7 skin is the default for widgets on iOS and you have to specifically pick the non-IOS7 widget skin for iOS if you want the older look.

Hope that helps

Rob

#3

WOW…it seems a bit more daunting thant I thought even though I’m still preaching and promoting corona as an ambassador, it doesn’t compared to what has changed as to what a developer actually has to keep up with :slight_smile:

Thanks a lot Rob…guess I’ll start with what you posted and take it from there…I might be online more often asking questions…again as a noob :slight_smile:

-rd

#4

Regardless of whatever platform you would develop on, you would run into these issues.  Corona SDK really does make life better.

Rob

#5

Hi @rdcube.

If you’ve been out for a couple of years, quite a bit has changed.  Public build 2076 is the first build with our news Graphics engine, and there are things that changed that pretty much will cause problems with previous 3rd party libraries until they update themselves.  Many of the libraries you listed haven’t been updated in over a year and some of those developers are no longer active.

You can add this line to your config.lua:

graphicsCompatiblity = 1

in the same place where you set the width and height for your device and it will make most of the changes with the Graphics engine behave like the old Graphics 1.0 engine.  It’s not perfect and you may have to modify those libraries as necessary.  

Now to catch you up to speed on your devices.   There are not too many iPhone 3’s out there still which were 320x480.  The iPhone 4 family doubled that resolution to 640x960.  The iPhone 5 family keeps the 640 wide but is now 1136px tall.    The iPad 1, 2, and mini are 768 x 1024 in size, while the iPad 3, 4, Air and Retina Mini are 1536 x 2048 in size.

So how do you support a universal build on that?  Read these two posts in order.  The 2nd one depend on the first one:

http://www.coronalabs.com/blog/2012/12/04/the-ultimate-config-lua-file/

http://www.coronalabs.com/blog/2013/09/10/modernizing-the-config-lua/

By the time you are done with the second one,  you will be able to build a config.lua file that will properly size any screen and select a set of images appropriate for the screen in question.   It should be noted, that the second post makes a recommendation that moves away from the old 320x480 base screen size to something more modern.  For your old apps, or if you plan to use pickerView widgets or some ad functions, it may be best to stay with the 320x480 content area rather than adopting the  800x1200 area recommended.  Moving forward with new apps, if you don’t need a pickerView, the larger area makes sense given modern hardware.

There is one other very important gotcha.  When Apple came out with the iPhone 5, they used a hack to get the operating system to determine if its a “tall” app (4" 1136px) vs a normal app (3.5" 960px high).  You must have a file named exactly:

Default-568h@2x.png

in the folder with your main.lua.  This file must be 640px wide and 1136px high portrait orientation only.  The name is case sensitive.  If this file is not present, iOS will assume your apps is for a 3.5" iPhone 4 device and not give you the extra pixels.  More importantly, Apple is now rejecting apps that don’t use the full height of the iPhone 5 family.  So this is an absolute must.

Apple also created challenges for app developers with iOS 7.  There are a whole bunch of things you need to be aware of when creating iOS 7 apps.  We summarized that here:

http://www.coronalabs.com/blog/2013/09/17/tutorial-getting-started-with-ios-7/

It should be noted that as of now, The iOS 7 skin is the default for widgets on iOS and you have to specifically pick the non-IOS7 widget skin for iOS if you want the older look.

Hope that helps

Rob

#6

WOW…it seems a bit more daunting thant I thought even though I’m still preaching and promoting corona as an ambassador, it doesn’t compared to what has changed as to what a developer actually has to keep up with :slight_smile:

Thanks a lot Rob…guess I’ll start with what you posted and take it from there…I might be online more often asking questions…again as a noob :slight_smile:

-rd

#7

Regardless of whatever platform you would develop on, you would run into these issues.  Corona SDK really does make life better.

Rob