My first Android app

*jealous

Nice. Hard to get my head around how those two diagrams can look so different. How much extra engineering effort was it to re-jigger for Android?

Tried to download it just now and couldn't find it on the market. Found a reference to it on another site via QR code that brought me to a "Not found" page on Market.

It shows up for me still, tho I had to reboot my phone before it would show me up-to-date data; it was still showing me what was cached from last night. The app declares that it needs Android 2.1 or better, which may not be entirely true; I should re-examine that.

In terms of code changes:
- there are about 600 lines of new Java code, which are responsible for app startup and lifecycle, setting up OpenGL, receiving touches and passing them on to the native layer, reading the accelerometer, running the sound engine. this replaced about 1500 lines of equivalent iOS code, with the sound layer making up most of the difference in size. there are about 500 lines of C++ code in the Android version that just handle interfacing to the Java side. JNI is a meep.
- time is very different on the 2 platforms. on iOS, time is a floating point number of seconds; on 1 frame "time" may be 1.0 and on the next, it will be 1.03. on Android, time is an integer number of milliseconds. all of the code that did timing related stuff - anything with animation, pretty much - had to be changed.
- loading resources is quite different, and was much easier on iOS: you pretty much just open a file and read it. that's how it would be on the Java side on Android too, but for the C++ code loading textures, and using save game files, it had to call back to Java and let the Java layer do all the I/O.

I guess that was about it. The GLES 1.1 code worked as-is once I got initialization working, as did most of the actual game, aside from the time issues. It was probably 2-3 weeks of actual work to port it, vs about 10-12 weeks for the original iOS version (including the ES 2 stuff, which was about 50% of that).

Wotak, it's a skill that can be learned very cheaply these days, if you have patience (and a certain degree of OCD helps a lot). The Android dev tools are all free, will run on Linux, Windows or Mac, and most new phones (I think?) will let you load apps over the USB port for testing and experimenting. Give it a try!

I wrote a "paperweight" app for my blackberry, and by wrote I mean throw against the wall.Back to the old Blackjack now, funny how that piece of meep has outlasted 2 new phones. Got windows 6 loaded on it finally so I might actually stick with it for now. Hats off to your programming skills, it seams like pure voo-doo to me.

Turns out I'm not very good at this game, but it runs great on my Galaxy S: Runs smooth and the movement response feels good.

Ooh, now I'm the jealous one. The Galaxy S looks awesome. Any complaints with it?

Thanks for looking! I updated it last night and lowered the required OS to 2.0 so maybe it will show up in the market for more people.

The Galaxy S is great. Mine is the Captivate from AT&T. It looks great and feels solid. Its fast as meep, especially if you apply the Lagfix (i used ext4) and run the 1.2 overclock kernel. I'm getting Quadrant scores of 2000-2250.

My only real complaint would be the GPS fix time. Its taking 35-50 seconds to get anything closer than 1000m. There are some suggested fixes. but I'm not having much luck.

It runs smooth on my evo and I like how I can hit the back key without any "are you sure you want to quit" bullmeep, instead it pauses and is ready to start when I go back to it.

Saving your game when you quit and restoring when you start again was one of the hardest things to port from the iPhone, oddly.