3.0.0 beta (ZGE on Android)

Rado1 · Post by **Rado1** » Mon Jul 02, 2012 10:28 am

I tried to make ZGEBullet working, but without success. Then, I tried to create a new testing application accessing another library. First, it was my own testing library, then I tried BASS.

Attached file contains the building folder of an application which tries to use BASS library with all SDK artifacts + ZGE project file. "ant debug" ran successfully, but the application crashes. I do not have a proper USB driver for my device, so it is difficult for me to debug its running. Ville, cold you please have a look at it and find bugs? Thank you in advance!

Post by **VilleK** » Mon Jul 02, 2012 11:20 am

Not sure what was wrong, but it is working now. I changed the title of the app to XXX so the apk has that name. I made sure that libzgeandroid.so was the latest version. Please try attached build folder.

Rado1 · Post by **Rado1** » Mon Jul 02, 2012 12:19 pm

Ville, probably the ZGE application you used for Eater (19.6.2012) did not support loading of libraries. Maybe...?

jph_wacheski · Post by **jph_wacheski** » Mon Jul 02, 2012 2:03 pm

That dockable devise sounds very cool Ville,. yes it is hard to design something for a device you can not test on, one reason I am looking to get that 7" 'tablet', as it is sorta' in the 'middle size'.

Attached is a quick sound sequencer test, (with my single touch input method) unfortunately in this type of implementation the sound lag does show up. I am thinking of some less timing critical sound toy ideas,. ambient stuff, or just noise lab type things.

Anyway, the tinny bit of lag seems ok for game sounds (less exacting timing), so I will do some more work on simple games,. . Thinking of less real-time, and more discreet turn types of designs, also due to the touch controls generally.

I am also interested in any input setup examples that can get good readings of multi-touch type events. This is a good source of some of the possible inputs; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch

Rado1 · Post by **Rado1** » Mon Jul 02, 2012 4:51 pm

Here we go!!! Attached you will find the first application with ZGEBullet created in ZGE. These several falling cubes being repositioned on tapping made me very happy

What about you?

Please try it and tell me how it is working on your devices. I tried it also on emulator and the performance seems to be good!

Updated version of the Android library compiled for android-8/armeabi can be found in this post.

Now, you can use physics in your applications. Have a fun! (as I have)

Post by **VilleK** » Mon Jul 02, 2012 5:57 pm

Nice work Rado1! I won't be able to test myself for a couple of days so I'd appreciate if you or Jph could upload a YouTube video of this just to show people the current state of the ZGE/ZGEBullet Android ports. And then Kjell could post it in on ZGE Twitter. Need to keep PR in mind

Rado1 · Post by **Rado1** » Mon Jul 02, 2012 6:06 pm

I could prepare some more sexy demo for YouTube.

Rado1 · Post by **Rado1** » Tue Jul 03, 2012 12:35 pm

I think this demo is better than the previous one. Scenes are switched by tapping. Unfortunately my device is quite slow, therefore, I would suggest to use tablet for making the final video.

Could someone of you make a video and send it to YouTube please?

jph_wacheski · Post by **jph_wacheski** » Tue Jul 03, 2012 1:31 pm

http://youtu.be/yRN__sVTOM4
just a short low quality video to prove it is running!

I also get a bit of slowdown,. but I think it still shows the potential. The castle is the coolest looking part.

Rado1 · Post by **Rado1** » Tue Jul 03, 2012 7:11 pm

Thanks Jph for the video.

Ville, could you please compile libzgeandroid.so also for android-10/armeabi-v7a? I would like to test performance of ZGEBullet for this target.

Note: android-ndk-r8 contains just android-9, not android-10 platform. That's strange, because Android SDK Manager tells that android-9 is obsolete. Anyway, compilation for both platforms gives the same results.

Post by **VilleK** » Thu Jul 05, 2012 6:28 pm

That's a very nice demo! It works stable on my device, perhaps just a little slowdown but nothing major.

Try building ZGEBullet with the following flags:

CFLAGS='-march=armv7-a -mfloat-abi=softfp'

It should then be using hardware float support and still be compatible with the existing libzgeandroid.

Btw, I've now allowed apk-extension as allowed on this forum so you don't have to zip before uploading in the future.

Rado1 · Post by **Rado1** » Fri Jul 06, 2012 12:25 pm

Thanks Ville for these flags. I should look at optimization more closely. After their usage and also little optimizing of Bullet calls in ZGE application I see that the overall performance is not so bad on tablets. For instance, computing and rendering of 200 near cubes influencing each other (which is the worst case) is about 35 FPS on Archos 80 G9. But this is valid only for ARMv7-A processors; if you do not have this, probably, the application will not run.

Post by **VilleK** » Fri Jul 06, 2012 2:25 pm

That's excellent Rado1, I get a stable 60 fps with some fluctuations down to 48 in the high tower scene. It makes sense that this demo is performance bound to floating point calculations. Let me know if you need help optimizing more, you can PM the sources if you don't want ZGEBullet public yet.

Another idea: Now when you guys have made two free ZGE Android apps on the market, how about trying to make the next ones commercial? At least for the $99 price range.

ZGE is 100% free (and also royalty free) so you could do this all by yourselves. Optionally you could (for a share that we agree on of the potential profit) let me be part of your game project. Helping test, debug and work out engine issues that may be needed for a commercial quality game. That could be an additional motivation factor for me to allocate more time for ZGE too. Any thoughts?

Rado1 · Post by **Rado1** » Sat Jul 07, 2012 1:28 pm

Ville, I would like to read/write files in Android applications.

1. For reading files by BASS library I tried to use /assets directory in the project folder, but I was not able to access the contained files. What's the correct path? Among many trials I used e.g. "/data/data/<appid>/assets/<filename>" but does not work. In java code is used getAssets() function, but what to use in ZGE?

2. When do you plan to make components File, FileAction and FileMoveData working on Android? I would like to use them to implement persistent storage of application-specific data, eg., settings, score lists, levels, etc. Which location to use for these files?

BTW I plan to make ZGEBullet public when I find some free time for it.

Post by **VilleK** » Sat Jul 07, 2012 1:49 pm

Getting files from assets from native code is apparently a problem because I find many articles about it when I search. The data files are never unpacked on the device which mean they stay compressed in the apk-file and cannot be opened using standard file operations. When accessing them from Java-code they go through a special API that I don't think is easy to use with ZGE.

A weird workaround is renaming your data files to library so-files because they do get uncompressed. This is described here: http://blog.bigpixel.ro/2010/04/ndk-and ... n-android/

About BASS, it can open files from memory too. So we should provide a feature in ZGE scripting so that a reference to a File components embedded content can be passed.

The File API in ZGE will be available soon. I will make it so that the default path will be in the applications data folder so that the ZGE Applications won't have to worry about setting paths.