Want my money back for Android

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

We paid $350 to get both Android and iOS support. The only reason we did our game in Corona was so that doing both Android and iOS would be easy. We were wrong.

Android performance is so bad that we can’t release our game even with a bunch of animations turned off. We spent an entire day completely restructuring our game after we read on the forums that directories are not supported for loading sounds and images on Android, but to no avail. And every time, we have to upload to the Corona server, wait for it to compile, and even then sometimes the server gives an error after waiting 5 minutes!

Ansca, either refund our money for Android, or fix it ASAP. You are hurting our business and we have wasted precious hours. [import]uid: 11559 topic_id: 7114 reply_id: 307114[/import]

#2

I think it might be a good idea, if Corona split up the Android Corona and iOS Corona since developer base is different, and feature/bug bases are also different.

Reduce confusion and possibly reduce pricing options on each type of license.

Just a thought. [import]uid: 6066 topic_id: 7114 reply_id: 25009[/import]

#3

Write an email to Ansca Mobile. Your post here will drown in the mass. [import]uid: 5712 topic_id: 7114 reply_id: 25046[/import]

#4

Ayena, I feel your pain. I’m in a very similar situation. I *have* emailed Ansca (Carlos) and didn’t get a very good response. It was all about how great Corona is and how many Corona apps are in the top of the iTunes store. Basically ignoring my issues about Android (which *doesn’t* have Corona apps in the top of the app store) and just saying that Android development is hard and that Corona is better/easier than native Java programming.

I also find my game running slowly on Android devices…even Android devices that are supposed to be fast. In fact, I can play some pretty graphically intense games on my DroidX that work fine, so I’m not really sure why Corona apps are so much slower. Creating a screen with a List View of 12 items each with an icon and some text takes 5 seconds on my DroidX. Way too slow.

What really bugs me though is that I’ve gotten no good feedback from Ansca on whether or not this is something they can fix. I haven’t actually spent the $350 on Corona yet, but I am concerned that I’ll waste the money (and more importantly my time) to get my app finished only to find that it works like crap on Android devices. I need cross-platform and not just a good iOS dev tool.

I’m still wondering if I should just bite the bullet and use native C++ development systems for iPhone/Android even though it might take me longer to learn the API and deal with C++.

I really *LOVE* Lua and really want Corona to work, but I am constantly being disappointed with the bugs and performance on real Android devices.

It doesn’t matter if Corona is easier to use/learn than native Java or C++ Android development if the resulting app is unplayable. [import]uid: 12529 topic_id: 7114 reply_id: 25749[/import]

#5

So far I’m seeing pretty good performance on my Nexus One with moving background tiles, and up to 30 interactive sprites using physics, and audio. I haven’t really tested the limits yet, but I downloaded a few of the Corona apps from the Android market, and they seemed good.

Do you have any videos of your app running poorly? I’m curious to see how much you have going on. [import]uid: 4596 topic_id: 7114 reply_id: 25762[/import]

#6

See my other post here: http://developer.anscamobile.com/forum/2011/02/24/performanceis-normal

No video needed. There is just a 5-second delay before the simple 12-item List View is displayed on the screen.

If I take out the calls to display.newImage or display.newImageRect then it is much faster. But loading and scaling 12 images (40x40 pixels in size) should not take this long.

See this post: http://developer.anscamobile.com/forum/2011/02/19/audio-delay-android
for issues with sound delays on Android. Notice the response “doing this on Android is really hard”. Well, other native development environments (I’ll be nice and not mention competitor names) don’t seem to have this problem. If you aren’t seeing problems with Audio then you must not be using the audio.play API on Android.

When you start doing more animation on Android, you’ll find that the animation just pauses every now and then. Maybe it’s Lua garbage collection. But it makes game control difficult. Never seems to happen on iOS devices.

Apps using the Physics engine seem to work better…that seems to be what Corona was designed/tested for. When you start doing more stuff yourself using transition.to and various timers, then you’ll run into more trouble. Just look at the problems with the Director class code on Android with timers and simple transition.to calls. Very unstable. Again, I think it’s garbage collection and memory issues in core Corona that the Director class is more sensitive to. For example, doing a screen transition on a “touch” event from a display.newRect will crash on Android hardware, whereas a touch event on a display.newImage will work fine. Both work fine on iOS.

And I haven’t even posted about other bugs such as single-digit number text not rendering properly on Android. I’m just getting very frustrated with Corona on Android in general.

There are plenty of other posts here in the forum about Android issues. Maybe they are getting answered with better support in the Subscriber-only forum. But I’ve uncovered all of these issues with only about 2 weeks of playing with Corona, which is why I have not subscribed yet and am still on the fence about it. [import]uid: 12529 topic_id: 7114 reply_id: 25773[/import]

#7

> we read on the forums that directories are not supported for
> loading sounds and images on Android

That is good to know. Any announcements from Ansca as to whether this can be changed in a future update? I have quite a few directions and subdirectories with images. (Though I suppose it’s possible to use dashes instead of folders, e.g. turning image/knight/player-1.png into image-knight-player-1.png.)

> I think it might be a good idea, if Corona split
> up the Android Corona and iOS Corona since developer
> base is different, and feature/bug bases are also different.

Hmm, not sure. While I’m currently only doing iPad games, one of the appeals of Corona to me is that in the future, when iPad-like devices come out by the competition, that I can easily port the existing games to those new devices. Not with zero work, but with minimum work. It would be great if that approach could be really kept in and strengthened in Corona, I think it’s one of the things making Corona a huge benefit for projects. As far as bug bases go, yeah that’s a different issue… might be worth splitting into categories… [import]uid: 10284 topic_id: 7114 reply_id: 25874[/import]

#8

MPotter:

And I haven’t even posted about other bugs such as single-digit number text not rendering properly on Android

Can you shed a little more light on this? If I understand it correctly, then my game is as good as dead on Android. Please say it isn’t so. [import]uid: 19383 topic_id: 7114 reply_id: 25876[/import]

#9

http://developer.anscamobile.com/forum/2011/03/01/android-update-please-read

They are making progress with Android, and why didn’t you try the Trial and tested for Android first? It’s written all over the forums that there is problems with Android but there is alot of progress =) [import]uid: 9577 topic_id: 7114 reply_id: 25905[/import]

#10

> And I haven’t even posted about other bugs such as single-digit
> number text not rendering properly on Android

I haven’t posted more about this because I haven’t had time to create a simple test app for it. But I have a “Stat Window” screen that displays character stats. Just using lines like this:
[lua]local t = display.newText( stat[i], 0, 0, nil, 16)[/lua]
where “stat” is an array of numeric values.

If the stat[i] value is a single digit then the text display is often corrupted on the physical Android device (DroidX). Almost like the width of the text isn’t large enough to display the entire number, or that the graphics from the number is being clipped somehow.

Anything > 9 (two or more digits) works fine. And it works fine in the Simulator and on iOS devices. I’ve tried loading “stat[i]” into a local string variable and there is no change. I haven’t tried using single character strings yet, which was on my list to do to try and pin down the problem. Just haven’t had time with all of the other things that are wrong with my app on Android.

All I can say is test your app on a physical Android device sooner rather than later to determine if Corona is really going to work for you. [import]uid: 12529 topic_id: 7114 reply_id: 25960[/import]