Undefeated - Now on STEAM, Android

[whitesphere]

The game installs and runs on my Galaxy S4, but no sound or music. :-(

For the curious on how the UI behaves:

- Transparent controls onscreen are how you move, go through menus and select items.   You can move the "movement compass" by clicking on its center and dragging it around the screen.

- The game plays with the phone on its side, probably for wider screen real estate.

The game is 141 MB for the curious, so not too big, but fairly large for an Android app.

 

[Kes]

Thanks for the info on the music.  That is especially annoying, as it is one of the strengths of the game.  Hopefully eversor will come up with a fix soon.

 

[FleetingInfinity]

The main problem on my Samsung Galaxy S3 is not the lack of sound, though it does lack that, but that none of the text shows up on the title screen.   Then once you go into the game the first letter of most sentences is missing.   Background images are missing, all kinds of texts and images do not load correctly.

 

[Kes]

Okay, I'll let eversor know, though he may be picking up posts here automatically.

Thanks for the info.

 

[Eversor]

The main problem on my Samsung Galaxy S3 is not the lack of sound, though it does lack that, but that none of the text shows up on the title screen.   Then once you go into the game the first letter of most sentences is missing.   Background images are missing, all kinds of texts and images do not load correctly.

Is there any chance you could post a screenshot of the problem and send it to

?

Here's a guide:

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/google-android/3446798/how-take-screenshot-on-android-phones-tablets/

 

[Kes]

I'm glad to be able to say that the sound problem has been sorted, and you should now have all music and sound effects.  If you have already installed the game, you should get an automatic update.

 

[Shion Kreth]

Alright, well, I bought it to show my support, but it's pretty screwed up. I had no text on the title screen, then passing that the choices text is always blank, the first letter of every message in the regular text menu is missing, and the message window itself instead of being blue or whatever it's supposed to be it's a mess of lines and colors like a malfunctioning nes. Then getting into the game the background(map), if I let my phone go to sleep while writing this it's just blank(black, save for the circle/check control) and remains that way until I press something(that's blank after I turn my phone back on, though I hope I don't need to specify that ).

Alright, it's not all blank for the map, there are scattered broken segments of it(ie. some stone floor tiles, then black tiles, then part of the stand, more black tiles, you get the idea). There is no name in the little box above the message window, and if you use the portraits in the message window... they're not there either. Getting into the first screen in the barracks the map is a little more coherent, but I can't really see what people are saying or interact with the menu so my playtest will conclude there; it's quite unplayable on my device at present.

Also the controls need a way to be locked down since you're moving your fingers over them by necessity(even if it just came innately locked in the bottom left and bottom right respectively that'd suit me just fine), otherwise I don't see anything wrong with their shape/individual layouts. Lastly, 4.99 is a bit high for the android market, I know it's already cheap compared to the pc market, but when faced with an array of pretty solid kemco titles around 3-4 dollars and other indie rpgs more like 2-3 dollars it'd be a hard sell. 

 

[Kes]

I'm sorry that you're having such difficulties.  I know that eversor is working on the text issue right now, but as it only affects some devices it's more difficult to track down the cause.  I'll pass on to him your suggestion about locking down the controls, to see if that's possible.

EDIT

On the lockable controls thing, move the controls to exactly where you want, go into 'Options' on the menu, and you can select 'lock' from there.

 

[whitesphere]

@Shion

It would make it easier for them if you said which particular phone or tablet you're running this on, such as "Galaxy S4" because there are a ton of Android devices which sometimes have unique "features" added on top of the OS.  Motorola loves to do this.

In my case (Galaxy S4), the sound and music are working properly now.

For the porting team:

How difficult was it to port the Undefeated game to the Android OS?  Is it "just" a matter of taking it easy on the scripts and music to keep package size down, then running the game through an extremely complex black box, and get an APK out the other side?

 

[FleetingInfinity]

Is there any chance you could post a screenshot of the problem and send it to

?

Here's a guide:

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/google-android/3446798/how-take-screenshot-on-android-phones-tablets/

Screenshots are sent, in the updated version the sound works fine, but the other errors are still present.

 

[gRaViJa]

Good to read the bugs are getting taken care of. Really looking forward to the finished porter and congrats again to ksjp17 for releasing the first official rm game on a mobile device!

@EversorI understand if you can't share this information but would the porter work for rmvx ace/rgss3 only or for rmvx and rmxp as well? Would help me decide which engine to use for my current project a lot! (stopped using the engine years ago, but the news about the porter got me back in the game)

 

[Shion Kreth]

Some better news, seems to run perfectly fine on a samsung galaxy tab 3(tablet) running android 4.4.2. 

 

[Kes]

I think eversor is very busy trying to solve the text problem on Galaxy 3 phones, so may not be around to answer general questions for a bit.  I can't answer in great depth, but I do have a bit of information.

@whitesphere

How difficult was it to port the Undefeated game to the Android OS?  Is it "just" a matter of taking it easy on the scripts and music to keep package size down, then running the game through an extremely complex black box, and get an APK out the other side?

Sadly, no it's not that easy.  In effect custom scripts have to be re-written (not exactly the right word, but there isn't another one which conveys the general idea) and that takes a lot of time and effort and can't easily be automated.  As more and more games are ported, however, it will mean that scripts will turn up which have already had the basic work done for them, so that it will become easier over time.  But the more scripts there are in a game, and the more complex they are, the more work is involved.  

When thinking about size, there is also the issue of parallax maps.  These take up a huge amount of file space, so it would make sense to keep them to the absolute minimum if you want to keep the package size down.  All music in .ogg format, and consider the length of individual tracks e.g. does your title music have to be nearly 4 minutes long when most players will only ever hear 30 seconds or so?  Cut it down to one minute.  That 4 minutes is not an exaggeration, btw, I've seen it done.  

@gRaViJa

I have read an article which specifically said that the port was not backwards compatible, so could only be used for Ace.  However, I do stress that it was in an article, not an official announcement, and so I cannot be sure where the writer got the information from.

 

[Thewindlord]

 Wait, about the android/ios compatibility... Can we expect that to be an official RPG Maker feature soon?

 

[Shion Kreth]

 Wait, about the android/ios compatibility... Can we expect that to be an official RPG Maker feature soon?

If I had to guess I'd say don't get too excited until they can work out the bugs and see if it's something that could be used on any game. Somehow my gut tells me it's not going to be something easily accomplished.. 

 

[Kes]

Soon? Most unlikely in my opinion. It's hugely complex, made more difficult by the fragmentation of the Android market which leads to all the compatability problems.

However this is the sort of question you need to ask direct to Degica. I assume that they have worked out a long term strategy for this.

 

[Ralpf]

I would guess that this is a test that will be used for their next release, not for any current released program. Just makes more sense that way to me (do they want to deal with the headache of patches and patches for patches and do we want to deal with the myriad of script incompatibility?). Just my guess with no real info.

 

[Kes]

It's not, as far as I am aware, an issue of script incompatibility - that is resolved within the game itself.  What is the issue is that different phones and tablets handle the data in different ways.  Because the Android market is highly fragmented, with many different handset specs and 'features', it is very difficult to come up with a way of ensuring that all of these can be catered for.  My guess is that this will be largely (but not totally) worked through on this game and that future games will be able to pick up on the knowledge learned and applied.  (Tough on me, though, to have all the initial problems).  My further guess is that once it is released, the iOS version will be much more straightforward, precisely because there is only a small selection of devices, all made by the same company, within the same broad set of 'features'.

 

[Engr. Adiktuzmiko]

yeah, it's more of an issue with each specific phone and the OS that is uses. Even other games on the market encounters different problems on different handsets.


At least for iOS, there's only iPhone and iPad?


for android it becomes really hard since we have constantly updated OS (at a rate faster than iOS I think) and we have different manufacturers for the phones which add their own things on top of the android OS.

 

[Shion Kreth]

Yes, but, it's no different than pc's coming from way more different manufacturers all cobbled together from a wider variety of parts also with a wide variety of windows os' that've been upgraded differently. It just boils down to that rpgmaker wasn't made for mobile, unlike other mobile games that were and don't have the same problems. Hopefully they can solve this, but if it's so unstable that any little changes to the android os or by the phone manufacturer screw everything up and requires manual patches to fix it... an exporter is never going to be practical.