Is Corona mature enough for Android ?

Solar2D Android
#1

Hello,

First off I want to say I really believe Corona is a great product. I have been using it for about 5 months now and so far have been able to do about anything I want to do in iOS. The 2 HUGE attractions to Corona for me are the ease of coding and the support for Android, iOS and soon Nook.

For Android though I am having serious issues. I have found others having the same problems. Others first reactions are probably like mine…“What the (whatever word you want) am I missing or forgetting?” Then you spend in some cases hours trying to find the problem and looking on the boards for solutions. I will admit I am not an expert programmer by any stretch of the imagination, so maybe I am more apt to feel like I messed up more than others.

What is frustrating me the most is that one of my huge attractions to Corona is not panning out. I can have a complete working game in iOS that has errors that make it not releasable. Here are my current issues I can not seem to find an answer for.

1 Android takes forever to load and no load screen
2.Web popup looks zoomed in on Android and fine in iOS
3. When I slide open the physical keyboard on the Moto Droid the app just restarts and sometimes I get a timeout message.
4. For audio I went to MP3s with expected results on iOS. Works great but smaller file size. On Droid I went to MP3s and load time on the app was horrible. Took it back to wavs and it is a faster, but still very slow.
5. On iOS I hit the home button during the game and then go back to it and it picks up right where it left off. In Android it goes nuts. Sounds play while you are out of the app and when I go back in I can not get them to work right even using the proper event.

Now I know in some of these cases there may be a current solution I do not know about. I suspect there may be some way to get the pause and resume working right if the user presses the home button or gets a call, but again…in iOS my code works, but in Android it does not.

I see enough progress in Corona and I believe they are working hard at it and I intend to stick with it. I am just frustrated to see so many new things being worked on when I believe the brakes need put on and Android needs the focus until it works as intended. We are not talking about a smaller install base like webOS or Windows, Android is huge right now and going to get bigger.

This would not really be as much an issue to me if one of the key selling points was not Android support by coding once. I can not put a game out that restarts when a user gets a high scores and slides the keyboard out to type, or goes nuts when the phone rings.

Again, I am happy with Corona for iOS and this is my plea to put the brakes on new content until what should work on Android does work. I would think this would be a huge deal to the Windows only customers because they can only do Android. A new problem I am seeing now in Daily Builds is that not only do they need to get Android up to iOS, they need to get the Windows version up to Mac OS. I am basing that on what is stated in release notes. Most release notes seem to address Windows issues.

I would love for someone to prove me wrong and point me to the fix for the issues I mentioned.

Thanks for Listening [import]uid: 8533 topic_id: 9659 reply_id: 309659[/import]

#2

1 Android takes forever to load and no load screen

  • Loading images that are larger than the screen resolution of the device is very SLOW. For example using newimagerect with a 1024x768 image to scale down to a 320x480 screen device can take 4+ seconds. Also image loading is quite slow on android right now. The only workaround I’ve found is to preload images in a static part of your app, like a menu screen.

2.Web popup looks zoomed in on Android and fine in iOS

  • It seems that web popups aren’t scaled properly by the dynamic scaling in Corona. You can resize them manually by calculating the actual number of pixels. See the code here in section 3, the second code block, to see how to calculate the pixels.

http://www.base2solutions.com/walkabout/Corona%20Tips.html

  1. When I slide open the physical keyboard on the Moto Droid the app just restarts and sometimes I get a timeout message.
  • Bug :frowning:
  1. For audio I went to MP3s with expected results on iOS. Works great but smaller file size. On Droid I went to MP3s and load time on the app was horrible. Took it back to wavs and it is a faster, but still very slow.
  • Use the old media.play etc api’s. They are much faster. If you need to play 2 sounds at once, then use audio.play for the second.
  1. On iOS I hit the home button during the game and then go back to it and it picks up right where it left off. In Android it goes nuts. Sounds play while you are out of the app and when I go back in I can not get them to work right even using the proper event.
  • You need to implement resume/suspend. Its safer to just save state and quit the app, then reload it on resume. Different devices react diferently to resume :confused: As for the sound, it seems channel 1 is also used by the media player, and it gets quite confused! Make sure to stop your sound on channel 1 when you detect a suspend event.

I’ll document more of this stuff in my tips/tricks page when I get a chance. Also if you except to support arm6, have a look at the table on that page. Daily 319 is probably your best bet. [import]uid: 8872 topic_id: 9659 reply_id: 35329[/import]

#3

Thank you very much for your reply. That is very helpful. I really appreciate it.

Take Care,
Gary [import]uid: 8533 topic_id: 9659 reply_id: 35365[/import]